From One Site to Twenty: A Reusable Blueprint for Manufacturing at Scale

One successful production site became a standardized, reusable architecture now defined for more than 20 global facilities. In this session, we'll show how we partnered with one of the world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturers to replace decades-old point-to-point integration with an enterprise event-driven architecture—turning a single manufacturing use case into a repeatable blueprint for real-time operations at scale.

The starting point was familiar: IBM MQ-based point-to-point messaging, 24-hour data latency, no message replay, and fragmented integration across SAP, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), process historians, and downstream quality systems—constraints that slowed decisions and capped the ability to scale during periods of unprecedented demand. Rather than treating Kafka as another messaging layer, we designed a real-time streaming backbone running on-premises at the manufacturing edge, spanning both Level 3 manufacturing systems and Level 4 enterprise applications—a deployment model shaped by the strict compliance and data-residency requirements of regulated pharmaceutical operations. We'll cover the decisions that make this repeatable—platform sizing, topic strategy, schema governance, connector selection, stream processing, and security—and how the first use case seeds a roadmap spanning real-time batch release, process-alarm and deviation analytics, and tiered real-time, near-real-time, and batch consumption that serves both operational dashboards and emerging AI-agent workflows directly from the streaming platform.

Architects, platform engineers, and engineering leaders will leave with a concrete adoption roadmap: how to retire legacy integration patterns, standardize a scalable streaming architecture for manufacturing, and scale from one proven use case into an enterprise-wide data streaming platform.