former-aws

I’m trying to pressure-test a pattern I keep seeing in industrial and asset-heavy operations, and I’d value perspectives from people who’ve lived this.

In many environments (manufacturing, equipment rental, oilfield services, aerospace, medical devices), quality and ops work often starts outside formal systems: - inspection notes written by hand - photos on phones - voice notes from the field - emails and spreadsheets coordinating fixes

ERP/QMS systems exist, but under time pressure the work happens elsewhere first. When an audit, customer escalation, or safety question hits, teams scramble to reconstruct what actually happened from scattered artifacts.

A few questions I’m genuinely curious about: - Have you seen environments where this doesn’t happen? What made them different? - Where does reconstruction pain show up the most — audits, customer disputes, asset recertification, something else? - What information tends to get lost when work is summarized or normalized too early? - Who usually carries the burden of “proving” things are fine when something escalates?

I’m not selling anything or looking to promote a tool. I am just trying to understand where reality breaks abstraction in practice.

Would appreciate any firsthand experiences or counterexamples.

Full context: A friend and I are working on addressing a pain point that bugs both of us. There is a painful disconnect that exists between understaffed data teams who clean and build dashboards/reports AND the non-technical teams who end up consuming those reports.

To probe further, we ended up doing a lean startup style "customer discovery" interview process. We ended up talking to 35+ people in the SMB space which validated some of our initial hypothesis but also not giving a strong signal on the top pain point.

So, what are the challenges you face? I would love to hear how you are dealing with these challenges. If you prefer to shoot me an email, you can find my email on my profile.

Thanks in advance!