A global automaker is weeks away from the most important moment in its programme calendar: the first vehicle body rolling off a brand-new production line. The plant is gleaming, the robots are in place, and the investment runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. And then the bodies come out wrong. A weld sequence is off. A robot arm clips a fixture. A critical geometry check fails. The launch slips. Every single day of delay costs the OEM a small fortune.
This scenario, once painfully common in the automotive industry, is not a story of bad engineers. It is a story of engineering in the