The planning spreadsheet
One file, one owner, printed each morning and out of date by ten o'clock.
✦ Manufacturing
Custom manufacturing software for businesses the ERP vendors ignore
Works orders, shop-floor capture, quoting and traceability, built around how your factory actually runs - not a six-figure ERP you only use a fifth of.
✦ Where it hurts
The problems we're usually called about
Quoting takes days
Estimating rebuilds the same calculation every time because the pricing logic lives in someone's head.
No live view of the floor
You find out a job slipped when the customer calls, not when it happened.
Paper job packs
Travellers annotated in biro, typed back in later by someone in the office, if at all.
Traceability on demand
A batch query means digging through folders for an hour, and the audit is next week.
ERP that never landed
You bought it, you use the stock module, and the rest was too rigid to adopt.
✦ Modules
What we build for manufacturers
Delivered one module at a time, each live and useful before the next begins.
- Works order management from release to completion, with live status by cell
- Shop-floor data capture on tablets or scanners: start, pause, complete, scrap and reason codes
- Finite and visual scheduling, with drag-and-drop resequencing and capacity views
- Quoting and estimating with your material, labour and overhead rules encoded once
- Bills of materials and routings, with revision control
- Batch and serial traceability, forwards and backwards, produced in seconds
- Goods in, stock locations, WIP and despatch, integrated with your accounts package
- OEE, scrap and on-time-delivery reporting on your definitions
✦ Reality on the floor
Built for gloves, dust and bad wifi
Shop-floor software fails when it is designed at a desk. Screens need to be readable at arm's length, targets big enough for a gloved finger, and workflows short enough to complete between operations.
We assume the wifi drops. Capture keeps working and syncs when the connection returns, because an operator who loses their entry twice will go back to paper and never tell you.
✦ Questions we get asked
Manufacturing software questions
Should we buy an ERP instead?
If your processes are conventional and you are prepared to adopt the vendor's way of working, an ERP can be the cheaper route and we will say so. Bespoke wins where your process is the reason customers choose you.
Can it work alongside our existing ERP?
Yes, and often that is the best answer: keep the ERP for finance and stock, and build the shop-floor and quoting layers it does badly, connected by an integration.
What about traceability and audits?
Batch and serial genealogy is recorded as work happens, so a recall or audit query is a search rather than an afternoon in the filing cabinet.
Will operators actually use it?
They will if it is faster than paper. We design the capture screens with the people using them and pilot on one cell before rolling out.
Tell us what isn't working. We'll tell you what we'd build.
Thirty minutes. Bring the process, the systems it touches and the deadline. You'll leave with an approach and an honest answer on whether custom software is the right call.
No pitch deck · We map your process · You own the software