The problem
Model Obaly is one of the largest corrugated packaging producers in the Czech Republic. Part of the Swiss Model Group, it supplies brands including Nestlé, Kraft Foods, Lego, and Mars from four factories around the country. The Opava plant alone had accumulated over 300,000 pages of technical documentation: manuals, PLC programs, maintenance logs, and spare parts databases, spread across shared drives, physical binders, and the heads of long-serving engineers.
Nobody could search it. When a machine stopped, whether a printer, a laminator, or a die-cutter, the maintenance team had to know the right person, not the right system. Knowledge sat in individuals, and as experienced engineers retired, it was quietly leaving the building. The plant was running on memory and luck rather than on structured, accessible data. The risk wasn't only downtime today; it was the permanent loss of expertise built over decades.
