The telephone game: how intent degrades from LOI to FAI

Every factory you’ve ever bought from started life as a two-page letter of intent. Between that signature and the first sellable unit sits a process almost nobody outside it can see — and almost nobody inside it can see all of.

This is the first piece in an FLM™ 101 series about where factories come from: who designs them, which tools they use, and why the whole thing takes as long as it does. If you’ve ever waited on a line to come up, you already know the ending.

A factory is designed four times

The OT team lays out machinery and process. The IT team wires systems, data, and security around it. The AEC side designs the building that has to hold it all. And then a fourth design emerges on the plant floor, where reality edits everyone’s drawings.

The factory was designed four times, by four teams, in four tools. None of them could see the other three.

The telephone game, quantified

Intent degrades at every handoff. A machine moves 400mm in a CAD revision; the electrical drop doesn’t follow; the conduit gets poured where the drawing said, not where the machine is. Multiply by a thousand decisions:

The seams, named

• Tool seams — exports, re-draws, version drift between CAD, BIM, and spreadsheets.
• Team seams — OT, IT, and AEC each optimizing a factory the others can’t see.
• Time seams — decisions made in design that operations inherits blind.

What FLM™ changes

Factory Lifecycle Management™ treats the factory as one continuous system with one living model. Not a new CAD, not another dashboard — a thread that carries intent across tools, teams, and years without dropping it. The existing tools stay; the seams go.

In the next piece: the LOI→FAI clock, and why it — not software licenses — is where the money actually goes.