Industries
Manufacturers rarely lack systems. They have an ERP for finance and stock, a CAD and PDM estate for drawings, spreadsheets for estimating, a whiteboard for scheduling and paper travellers on the shop floor. Each is defensible on its own. Together they mean nobody can answer the two questions that decide profitability: what did that job actually cost, and where is it right now.
We build the manufacturing layer that closes those loops — quoting, routing, shop-floor booking, material traceability, machine data and job costing — and integrate it with the ERP and engineering systems you already run.
Where it breaks
Quotes are produced from a workbook that encodes material rates, cycle-time assumptions, setup allowances and a margin the estimator applies by feel. It is often accurate, but it is not inspectable, it cannot be compared against outturn, and it leaves with the person who built it. Win rates and quoted margin cannot be analysed because the inputs were never stored as data.
Time is booked on paper or not at all, scrap is absorbed silently, and rework is rebooked against the original job number. At month end the finance system reports a blended margin across all work, which conceals the fact that a subset of jobs is being run at a loss and repeat-quoted at the same price.
Usable remnant stock sits on racks with no record, so new bar, sheet or billet is bought while material that would have done the job is written off months later. A digital remnant library with dimensions, grade, certificate reference and location turns that stock back into inventory the estimator can quote against.
Sequence, machine capability, tooling availability, operator skill and promised dates are held informally. When a hot job arrives the plan is rebuilt in someone's head, downstream impacts are discovered late, and customer service promises delivery dates the shop cannot support.
Certificates, inspection sheets and non-conformance reports sit in folders and email. Producing a genealogy pack for a customer audit takes days of manual retrieval, and a genuine containment exercise — which parts came from that heat number, which shipped, to whom — cannot be done quickly at all.
Business Central, Sage 200 and SAP Business One handle ledgers, purchasing and stock competently. Bespoke routing, dynamic operations, part-quantity splits, concessions and shop-floor realities get bolted on through customisation until upgrades become risky and the workaround becomes the system.
Regulatory context
Integration surface
ERP and finance
Engineering and CAD
Shop floor and machine data
Identification and logistics
Solutions
RFQ and estimating, job routing, shop-floor booking, remnant and material control, and estimated-versus-actual costing built to your process rather than a vendor's reference model.
Explore custom manufacturing platformsTwo-way integration with Business Central, Sage 200 or SAP Business One, plus OPC UA and MQTT capture from controllers and edge gateways where the machines expose data.
Explore erp and machine integrationA warehouse layer that turns booking, telemetry and quality data into OEE, margin-by-customer and quote-to-outturn reporting that survives audit.
Explore manufacturing data and reportingPhased replacement of Access databases, unsupported MRP installs and Visual Basic tooling using a strangler pattern, so production never stops for a cutover.
Explore legacy shop-floor system replacementEngagement shapes
Questions
Usually alongside. Sage 200, SAP Business One and Business Central hold finance and stock adequately; what they handle badly is quoting bespoke work, routing a job across mixed machine groups, and reconciling estimated against actual cost. We build the manufacturing layer around the ERP and write back the transactions finance needs, rather than attempting a rip-and-replace that would put the ledger at risk.
Where the machines expose it. Modern CNC controllers and PLCs speak OPC UA or can publish over MQTT through a gateway; older equipment often only offers dry contacts, a serial feed or a counter that can be read by an edge device. We survey the shop floor during discovery, list what is readable per asset, and design around the gaps instead of assuming full telemetry that does not exist.
Material batch, operator, machine, program revision, inspection result and non-conformance are recorded against the job and the individual part where serialisation applies. That gives you a genealogy record you can produce for an ISO 9001 audit, a customer PPAP pack or a recall investigation without reconstructing it from paper travellers.
RFQ and estimating, job creation and routing, and shop-floor booking, because those three restore the estimated-versus-actual loop that most manufacturers have lost. Machine telemetry, scheduling optimisation and executive dashboards follow once the transactional data is trustworthy — dashboards built on bad booking data simply publish the error faster.
Yes. Subcontract machining, fabrication and assembly are the hardest cases because every job is different, the routing changes mid-flight and outwork has to be tracked off site. Those constraints are the reason a configured product usually fails and a bespoke manufacturing layer holds.
Send the problem, not a brief. We will tell you whether it is a project we should be involved in.
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