15 years of making manufacturing awesome

15 years is a lot of change

In 2011, a car headlamp was a simple thing. A bulb, a reflector, and a lens. Three or four operators could put one together.

Today a single lamp on a premium model can carry more than 10 printed circuit boards, and its assembly can involve 20 to 30 operations.

"So you can imagine how the complexity increased — and being in manufacturing for more than twenty-five years, I've seen a huge shift in the industry," says Yuri Pylypenko, OLSOM's founder and CEO.

Manufacturing changed. So did OLSOM.

Today, AGW, our smart manufacturing platform, supports operations across 57 plants and more than 8,500+ users worldwide.

Watch the OLSOM team look back on 15 years of change, growth, and making manufacturing awesome.

No two factories are the same

Before OLSOM, Yuri spent years as a systems integrator, developing automation solutions for manufacturers one project at a time. The more factories he worked with, the clearer one thing became: the available tools rarely fit a particular plant.

Two plants can belong to the same company and sit a few streets apart, and still run on very different processes. A manufacturer could buy an off-the-shelf system that covered perhaps 60 to 70 percent of what a plant needed, or commission a custom solution built so specifically for one facility that it was difficult to reuse anywhere else.

"I wanted to create the product that would work for me as an integrator," Yuri says, "one that could cover a wide variety of different tasks, while remaining upgradable and maintainable."

That became the idea behind AGW: instead of forcing a factory to adapt to the software, create software flexible enough to adapt to each factory's unique path to digital transformation.

The team building it was small enough to fit in an apartment.

“It was a small company of six people,” remembers Alex Kryvets, now Head of Customer Success at OLSOM. “We were universal soldiers, doing everything for everyone. It felt like a small family, and we did really big things for our customers.”

OLSOM's first project was a line that sequenced headlamps at a plant in the Czech Republic. Fifteen years later, that line is still running on AGW.

The people behind OLSOM

That six-person team has since grown to fifty, working across Europe, North America, and Latin America. Many of the people behind OLSOM today have been part of that journey, expanding their expertise and taking on new roles along the way.

Product Manager Polina Grechko is one of them. She joined OLSOM as a Technical Writer before moving into business analysis and eventually product management. Each step brought her closer to the product and gave her a different perspective on how AGW is developed, delivered, and used by customers.

“I got tons of very different experiences and had a chance to view things from different perspectives,” she says. “And I have changed here a lot, professionally and personally.”

Volodymyr Kronda has spent eight years on the delivery team. But ask him to name his favorite project, and he can’t pick just one.

"With every move to another customer, that one becomes my favorite. Each one has something the last didn't."

What he takes from each experience also shapes how he approaches the next challenge.

"I keep coming back to how we can modernize things and improve the approaches we use on a project," he says. "Over time those build up, and I bring them into newer projects and newer customers."

Delivery Engineer Serhii Linskiy has worked with the same plant since he started at OLSOM. It is a large facility, with several AGW services running across a wide range of processes, and as the plant has grown, so has the scope of what he does there.

"I grew from someone learning the system piece by piece into someone who could confidently take on complex tasks and support long-term customer projects," he says.

The work itself is only part of why people stay. Volodymyr remembers the years when the whole team shared one office.

"With most of the team, we weren't just colleagues, we were friends," he says. "I came into the office to work, and also to spend time with my friends."

Serhii remembers an unusual piece of feedback from his first months: he was focusing too much on work and should spend more time getting to know his colleagues.

"Looking back, I think that says a lot about the company's culture," he says. "People and teamwork are valued just as much as results."

MES Consultant Alexander Dergachev remembers offline stand-ups, Friday gatherings, and Delivery Talks over pizza. Polina remembers game nights and heated discussions.

Fifteen years of OLSOM is made up of plenty of product releases and customer projects. It is also made up of people who embrace new challenges and grow with the company along the way. Because making manufacturing awesome has always depended on the people behind it.

How AGW evolved

The first version of AGW would be hard to recognize today. The idea behind it has not changed: software flexible enough to adapt to the way different factories actually work.

Over fifteen years, the platform grew alongside the manufacturers using it. There was never a fixed blueprint for what it would look like by now. Each new plant brought something different, and much of the product took shape through solving those problems alongside customers.

The clearest example is the screen operators work with on the line, what we call the Workstation.

The early version answered one question. How is this machine running right now. It covered a single station with one production flow, and production, scrap and downtime sat around one OEE number. Every plant got the same layout.

The current Workstation starts from the same place and goes further. One station can run several production flows at the same time, each with its own parts and its own downtimes. The OEE value opens into availability, performance and quality. The layout is configured per station, so a plant sees what its operators actually need.

The rest of the platform moved the same way. The screens that show production data across the plant used to need someone who knew the database to build a single dashboard. Now a plant assembles its own dashboards, and one map can hold every facility a company runs. The Portal absorbed tools that once ran as separate applications, and it is where a plant sets up its equipment, products, shifts and access rights.

AGW is now a composable smart manufacturing platform, designed for the complexity of discrete manufacturing. Manufacturers shape it around their own processes, starting with the capabilities they need today and adding more later.

"We cannot address future pains with today's tools," Yuri says. "MES is no longer a standalone application. In the case of AGW, it never was. It's a dynamic environment that drives a real-time decision-making process. And we are here to make this happen."

What hasn’t changed

A lot about OLSOM looks different fifteen years later. The team is bigger, the product has come a long way, and the challenges we solve have become more complex.

What hasn't changed is how seriously we take our relationships with customers. Support has always meant more than fixing problems. It means knowing their operations well enough to help before small issues turn into downtime.

“We work in mission-critical environments, where the reliability of the system and the continuity of our services cannot be interrupted even for five or ten minutes,” Yuri says.

That commitment doesn't end at implementation. OLSOM's first customer is still with us today, and our retention rate stands at 99.2%. Many projects have grown into long-term partnerships, evolving as needs change and new challenges emerge.

We’re proud to see that commitment recognized by our customers and the industry. Today, AGW holds a 4.8/5 rating on G2. Our ease of use and customer support have also earned recognition from Capterra and Software Advice in 2023 and 2024.

After fifteen years, that may be one of the best measures of what we’ve built: a product customers rely on, and a team they know will show up when it matters.

Thank you for 15 awesome years

Everything OLSOM is today has been shaped by the people who have been part of it.

To our customers, thank you for your trust, for bringing us new challenges to solve, and for continuing to grow with us over the years.

To our partners, thank you for working alongside us, sharing your expertise, and helping us go further together.

And to our awesome team, past and present, thank you for the ideas, the energy, the care, and everything you have brought to OLSOM over the years.

I really appreciate every moment of our history. The journey wasn’t always straightforward, but despite every hurdle, we kept moving forward and growing. And I believe we have a great future ahead of us. If you ask me what makes OLSOM special, it’s the people. With a team this strong, sharing the same values, I’m confident there’s a lot more ahead of us._{— Yuri Pylypenko, Founder & CEO}