Paperless Electroplating, Half the Failed Batches

In electroplating for aerospace and defense, traceability is not a nice-to-have. The standards these sectors demand require a clean, defensible record of what was done to each component and under what conditions. For an electroplating shop, that means the state of every chemical bath - and everything done to it - has to be documented and defensible.

At C. Jentner, the work was being done to that standard. The evidence of it was not. The record of operations, scheduled maintenance and chemical replenishments for each bath lived on paper. That created two specific problems. First, it was hard to keep the dosages applied to each bath aligned with the recommendations of the technologist responsible for bath chemistry - paper does not warn you when a value drifts. Second, the laboratory analyses of bath chemicals and their concentrations sat in one place while the record of the work done on those baths sat in another, so connecting the chemistry to the actual production was slow, manual and error-prone.

The result was a process that worked, but one whose paper trail was fragile, hard to query, and dependent on people transcribing the right numbers in the right place every time.

We built a Laravel and React web application that turns each bath into a single, queryable record rather than a stack of forms. The design principle was simple: the chemistry and the work done on it should never live apart again.

The application records every operation performed on each bath, and tracks scheduled maintenance and chemical replenishments against it. Dosages are kept in line with the technologist's recommendations, so the people working the shop floor have the right target in front of them rather than a number remembered from a paper sheet. Laboratory analyses of bath chemicals and their concentrations are logged against the same bath, so the analytical picture and the production history are two views of one record, not two disconnected archives.

Most of the engineering effort went where it mattered for a regulated process: modeling the real shop-floor workflow accurately, and making the act of logging fast enough that operators would actually do it in the moment rather than reconstructing it later.

The plant now runs paper-free. Every bath has a complete digital history, and 100% of operations are logged in the system rather than on forms that can be lost, misfiled or transcribed wrong.

The headline operational result is that failed electroplating batches dropped by half. That improvement follows directly from the design: when operations and dosages track the technologist's guidance, and when deviations are visible against the bath's own record, problems get caught early instead of surfacing as a scrapped batch at the end. The structured record does the watching that paper could not.

The system has been running in production for a year - long enough to say it holds up under the daily reality of a working plating shop, not just in a demo.

The hard part of this project was not the framework choice. It was getting the domain model right for a regulated process, and making logging fast enough that it happened in real time on the shop floor.

A traceability system is only as good as the data people are willing to put into it. If logging an operation is slower than scribbling it on a sheet, the sheet wins and the digital record rots. We spent disproportionate effort on the speed and clarity of the operator interface for exactly that reason, and it is the single thing we would protect most aggressively if we built it again. The data model can be refactored. Operator trust, once lost, is much harder to win back.