It was a dream assignment. Jean-Luc and I had worked together several times; we were friends as well as colleagues. Between us we had years of experience in a variety of computer systems used in manufacturing, and our strong suit was computer-based process sensing and control. The European company's twin factories were designed to extrude metal powder into a very precise, state-of-the-art film that would then be sliced into narrow rolls for specific orders.
Our job was designing and implementing quality control and metal-roll tracking. Not only would our system detect faulty material for removal, it would also track the process, just in case the sensors failed to detect an error. If a customer discovered a defect in a roll, the record-keeping routines in our system would track it back to the slicing step, the QC lab, the extrusion batch, the powder fed to the extruder, the rail car in which the powder arrived, the manufacturer of the powder, and all the employees who had worked on each step. This allowed for product recall as well as process remediation.
The best part of this, the "dream" part, was that in approximately three months, we would swap houses, cars, and pets. Jean-Luc would spend three months living in my house outside Las Vegas, installing the extrusion process in the U.S. plant. I would spend three months in the south of France (tres charmant) installing the slicing-QC system in the Toulouse factory. This seemed too good to be true.
And it was. Several months into the project, the European client decided to increase its U.S. footprint and bought a failing chemical company outside Shreveport, La. The chemical company had a large IT department which, like the company itself, saw its staffers heading straight for oblivion. The IT guys looked at our specs for the control systems and told our client that our approach was naive. Naturally, they promised they could fix it.
Step one would be to stop all ongoing development projects. That meant me and Jean-Luc. The client fired FactorE. Jean-Luc never got his trip to Nevada, and I never got my time in France. It was disappointing, but not the end of the world. Jean-Luc and I went on to other clients and projects.