We wrote a Product Requirements Document before a single line of code.
130 pages. 22 sections. Four appendices covering config schemas, metric interfaces, Sparkplug B, and OPC-UA type mappings.
That sounds like waterfall. It is the opposite.
The PRD went through three review rounds. 61 gaps found. 23 blockers identified and resolved. Two independent reviewers confirmed it was implementation-ready before we opened an editor.
Why bother? Because manufacturing software fails in the gaps. The gap between what you assumed and what the PLC actually sends. The gap between “it works on my laptop” and “it runs on an ARM box in a factory with intermittent connectivity.”
We have built enough systems to know: the cost of finding those gaps in code is ten times the cost of finding them in a document.
CollatrEdge is an IIoT data collection agent. It reads from industrial equipment, processes the data locally, and forwards it to where it needs to go. Simple to describe. Hard to get right.
Today the PRD is done. Next, we write code.