Manufacturing companies are full of very smart people: engineers, technicians, skilled operators, maintenance people and so on. So, sometimes DIY (Do It Yourself) is the way to go to solve many problems in the company.This is not different when it comes to analytics systems for the production (sometimes called MES systems) and this is a valid approach. Software development is hard, but we must say that some companies are successfully doing it. Here we try to enumerate some of the mistakes that are normally made by manufacturing companies when trying to develop their own systems. 1. Since we are already doing this, we could as well… This happens in house renovations as well: we start wanting to replace the floor tiles, which would take us one month, but end up breaking walls. Since we are breaking the walls, we could as well remake the bathroom, and so on.Normally a project for production metrics at a company starts with: “let’s just add some sensors and save them on an SQL database, and we already know production, uptime, and speed” ( and that is a nice way to start ). But then new demands come: “how do we know the production…