Every manufacturing line carries the same risk: a small issue left unaddressed becomes an expensive one fast. A bolt on a tractor wheel isn't torquing to spec. The operator flags the issue, but the quality engineer is three buildings away and doesn't see the alert for twenty minutes. By then, several more tractors have moved down the line with the same defect—each one now headed to an offline repair bay. For CNH, a global manufacturer of agricultural and construction equipment, scenarios like this cost time, labor, and revenue every day.

Across CNH's nine North American production sites, factory-floor events—quality defects, missing parts, conveyor stoppages—generate hundreds of alerts every shift. Responding to those events once meant radios, text messages, and manual follow-ups. Supervisors often learned about problems only at shift's end.

The challenge wasn't just speed. It was consistency. Without a shared workspace, the same type of issue might be handled differently across shifts, stations, and plants. CNH needed a standardized, digital thread that would guide responders through each event, track resolution, and preserve context for future analysis.

"We were looking for a flexible solution that required less internal company resources to deploy," says Aron Oechsner, Regional Manufacturing Manager at CNH. The company needed a way to connect alerts from machines, automation systems, and frontline workers directly to the people responsible for resolving them—operators, engineers, supervisors, and plant managers alike.

Planting the seeds for change

CNH adopted IGear's SQUEAKS platform, a manufacturing app that captures real-time events from machines, systems, and people on the production floor, and built it directly into Microsoft Teams with implementation collaboration from Concept Reply. Because Teams was already CNH's collaboration hub, embedding SQUEAKS inside it meant alerts, guided workflows, and team communication lived in one place. This leads to faster resolution for factory-floor events, as well as immediate visibility for everyone from the frontline worker to the plant manager.

"The beauty of SQUEAKS being in Teams is that it's where everybody already is," says Sriram Ashok, Plant Manager, CNH. "I can see data coming in, react to it, and collaborate—all without switching to another tool. It’s completely embedded in our day."

The integration routes each event, whether a fluid leak, a torque failure, or a line stoppage, to the right responder with full context and a step-by-step workflow. Responders acknowledge ownership, attach photos, and update status, all within Teams. Automatic escalation ensures no event stays unresolved beyond a defined window.

“Because they're bringing operational events into the Teams environment everyone is already in, they know sooner and act faster. The alert is immediate and targeted, and from there they have step-by-step guidance directly within Teams on what to do next,” says Celine Mbanasor, Director of Customer Success at IGear.

An additional benefit of SQUEAKS being inside Teams is easier onboarding for workers due to the ease of use, and increased adoption and continued use. In a larger organization, simplifying change management can mean the difference between a successful deployment and one that never takes hold.

Cultivating consistency

Four CNH plants now run the SQUEAKS and Teams integration, with a corporate initiative to expand across all North American site, with potential rollout to more than 30 plants globally. The company is already seeing improvements in first-time quality and reduced offline repairs after assembly.

For Ashok, the next horizon of AI integration is just as motivating. “With Microsoft Copilot and Teams, the question is how we solve problems in the most efficient way. At the end of the day, I want to take redundant tasks away so people can focus on thinking and solving problems,” Ashok says.

Growing into the future

By bringing manufacturing events into a platform its workforce already knows, CNH is building a faster, more connected operation—one alert at a time. And for Oechsner, the integration signals a shift in how manufacturing leaders think about Microsoft itself: “Microsoft has always been a strong suite of applications for us to lean on, but I didn’t necessarily see it as the company that would help take manufacturing to the next level. This integration, especially combined with AI, is helping change that paradigm,” Oechsner says.