I think a more positive take away is that this is a relatively small traditional manufacturing business with a few hundred employees that managed to automate a lot of their workflows at a small captial cost using off the shelf components and a willingness to take a stab at skilling up their own staff to build a solution to solve their usecase.
The alternative is hiring a consultancy that may or may not actually deliver anything worthwhile at the cost of many thousands a day and leaving you with a solution that you cannot maintain because you completely lack the internal compentence as a consequence of outsourcing all of the development in the first place. More small/medium sized businesses should take risks like this.
We should honestly be questioning, esp in the UK, the degree to which we depend upon consultants for seemlingly everything and how little businesses and government are willing to invest in taking small bets on their own employees over hiring frankly overpriced consultants from Accenture or McKinsey who are often expensive suits backed by a bunch of very recent graduates with little or no experience.
The alternative is hiring a consultancy that may or may not actually deliver anything worthwhile at the cost of many thousands a day and leaving you with a solution that you cannot maintain because you completely lack the internal compentence as a consequence of outsourcing all of the development in the first place. More small/medium sized businesses should take risks like this.
We should honestly be questioning, esp in the UK, the degree to which we depend upon consultants for seemlingly everything and how little businesses and government are willing to invest in taking small bets on their own employees over hiring frankly overpriced consultants from Accenture or McKinsey who are often expensive suits backed by a bunch of very recent graduates with little or no experience.