Tato was one of the best decisions we made on the project, and I wouldn't want to do this project without it. ## About the project Héroux Devtek is a North American landing gear manufacturer — Canadian-headquartered, with plants across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Their parts end up on commercial aircraft, military aircraft, and helicopters flown around the world, which is to say this is the kind of manufacturing where the tolerances are tight, the compliance bar is high, and the systems that run the business need to be watertight. Michael Parke leads the IT function at Héroux Devtek. He's also leading one of the largest transformation programs in the company's recent history: a multi-year, multi-site Greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation, replacing legacy systems at every plant. More than 40 people are involved directly — external consultants, internal teams, and the executive leadership holding it all together. The project was approved, funded, and on track. What the leadership team needed was a way to stay confident it was _staying_ on track without Michael having to be in every room. ## The challenge For a CFO or a board, a Tier 1 ERP rollout isn't really a technology question. It's a governance question. How do you know a multi-year, multi-country, multi-million-dollar program is actually going well, as opposed to simply _looking_ like it's going well in the weekly status deck? Michael saw the problem early, and three specific pressures stacked up on top of each other. The first was visibility across a four-country program. With plants in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, and two working languages running in parallel, decisions were getting made in workshops that the leadership team couldn't realistically attend. The status reports said what they said, but nobody had a way to verify whether those reports matched what was actually happening on the ground. The second was the pattern that every Greenfield manufacturing ERP project seems to follow: the conversations that shape scope happen early, but the disputes that come out of those conversations surface months later. When that happens, resolution depends on whose memory wins — and on a complex manufacturing build, losing one of those disputes can cost six figures per decision. The third was simply that Michael couldn't be everywhere. He was expected to run the project and keep day-to-day IT operations moving at the same time, which meant being physically present in every workshop across four countries was never going to be possible. Accepting filtered, second-hand information instead wasn't acceptable either. I can't be everywhere all at once. I needed a way to know what was being decided — even in meetings I wasn't part of. This is the governance problem that every executive sponsor of a large ERP program faces. It isn't about distrusting the people on the project. It's about the structural impossibility of being the accountable leader for a program whose full picture lives in hundreds of rooms you'll never sit in. ## How Tato entered the picture Michael became one of Tato's earliest adopters. The proposition was simple: an AI layer that captures every meeting, decision, and risk signal across the project automatically, so the record exists whether or not anyone has the bandwidth to write it down. He decided to try it, and what follows is what changed. ## What changed ### Executive visibility without being in the room Meetings Michael couldn't attend stopped being blind spots. The morning after a workshop at the Madrid plant or a design review with the UK team, he could see what had been discussed, what had been decided, and whether anything needed his attention — all without chasing anyone for a readout. I loved seeing decisions from meetings I wasn't even in. I could immediately step in if something didn't look right. The automated RAID log can totally change our governance. Eliminated blind spots across parallel workstreams in four countries Caught potential issues early, before they turned into cross-site rework Gave the leadership team a real picture of project health, not a filtered one ### Fewer meetings, deeper engagement When Michael did attend meetings, he stopped spending them typing. Tato handled the record, which freed him to focus on the strategic questions — the ones only an executive sponsor can answer — instead of on documentation. I used to spend meetings typing detailed notes. Now I can fully engage — or even miss a meeting entirely — because Tato captures every detail. Freed leadership to work on strategy instead of coordination Let multiple workstreams run in parallel without sacrificing governance Made every bilingual meeting fully searchable after the fact ### The end of "he said, she said" Several months into any complex project, people start remembering things differently. That isn't bad faith — it's simply what memory does under pressure. On a manufacturing ERP rollout, those memory gaps tend to compound into expensive scope disputes, and the team that holds the cleanest record usually holds the advantage. Tato gave the team a shared, searchable version of what had actually been said, so disputes that used to take a week now resolve in a matter of minutes. People come to meetings months later convinced we agreed on something… except everyone remembers it differently. Tato became our unbiased third party — just facts. Here's one example of how that played out in practice. An FAA-compliance detail specific to a landing gear component came up for discussion during the build phase, months after the original requirements workshop. In the old pattern, this is exactly the kind of question that takes days to untangle: people fishing through old email threads, debating whose recollection is correct, costs mounting while the team waits for a resolution. Instead, the team pulled up the recording from the month-three workshop where the requirement had been explicitly discussed. The context was complete, the timestamp was there, and there was no real ambiguity left to argue about. Within minutes, everyone — the customer, the integrator, and the leadership team — was working from the same ground truth. On a regulated manufacturing program, that kind of clarity is worth far more than the time it saves. Resolved misunderstandings in minutes instead of days Avoided commercial disputes that would have cost real money Kept momentum moving across a complex, multi-region build ## The results - **Over $500K saved** by resolving commercial disputes with factual records rather than opposing memories - **Hours reclaimed each week** across the leadership team — time that used to go into chasing clarifications now goes into actual delivery - **Stronger trust between internal teams and integrators**, because a shared factual record lowers the temperature of every hard conversation ## Strategic takeaways **Governance you can actually rely on, at manufacturing scale.** Real-time visibility and accountability across every workstream — not just the ones someone remembered to report on — is the difference between a project that stays in shape and one that drifts. On a multi-site program, that difference compounds every month. **Permanent project memory across a multi-year lifecycle.** A program this long has permanent turnover built in. People take new roles, roll off, and move on, which means the institutional knowledge of what was agreed and why tends to walk out the door with them. Tato gives the project a memory that outlasts any individual consultant, leader, or phase. **A cultural shift toward decision clarity.** When everyone knows the record is clean, the dynamic of the project changes. Fact-based clarity replaces finger-pointing, and teams move faster because nobody is quietly protecting themselves from a version of events that can't be verified. Tato was one of the best decisions we made on the project, and I wouldn't want to do this project without it. Most executives find Tato after the disputes have already started. The ones who find it at kickoff tend not to have the disputes at all.

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