hardScenarioDesignMidSeniorStaff
The MES is unreachable for four hours and the line keeps producing. What happens to the production record, and how do you reconcile afterwards?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
The line survives on cached work orders and locally queued events, so the difficulty is the merge, not the outage. Reconciliation has to be idempotent, ordered by source timestamp rather than arrival, and honest about units that passed a gate nobody could evaluate.
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Likely follow-ups
- The station had already written 200 of its 900 queued events before the link dropped again. What stops you double-counting?
- Material was consumed but never backflushed for four hours. What is now wrong in inventory, and who notices first?
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- Would you let the station cache the next work order before it needs it? What breaks if the plan changed?
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