Case Study · Manufacturing
From 14 spreadsheets to one ERP: a manufacturer's operations, unified
A 240-person manufacturer replaced spreadsheet-driven planning with a unified ERP - cutting inventory costs by a quarter and closing the books in three days instead of three weeks.
Mid-sized industrial equipment manufacturer · 240 employees
- 0%
- Reduction in inventory carrying cost within a year
- 0d
- Month-end close, down from three weeks
- 0.0%
- Inventory record accuracy at annual count
- 0
- Production stoppages from stockouts in the last two quarters
Client Overview
The situation
A manufacturer of industrial equipment had grown from 60 to 240 employees in six years. Its systems had not grown with it: production was planned on whiteboards, inventory lived in fourteen linked spreadsheets maintained by three different people, and finance closed the month roughly three weeks after it ended. Leadership knew margins were slipping but could not see where.
The Problem
What was breaking, specifically
Sales promised delivery dates the plant could not verify, because production capacity existed only in the planning manager's head and a whiteboard photographed weekly.
Inventory records were maintained in linked spreadsheets that regularly disagreed with the physical count. Stockouts halted production lines several times a month, while slow-moving stock quietly accumulated in the warehouse.
Job costing was calculated after completion using estimated labor and material figures. Several product lines believed to be profitable were, on real numbers, break-even at best - but nobody could prove it until quarter-end.
Month-end close took finance three weeks of chasing, reconciling and correcting, which meant every management decision was made on numbers at least a month old.
The Solution
What we designed and delivered
We began with a four-week discovery phase, mapping how orders, materials and information actually moved through the plant - including the informal workarounds the spreadsheets hid.
We implemented a unified ERP covering finance, inventory, purchasing, production planning and quality, configured around the manufacturer's actual routing and bill-of-materials structure rather than a generic template.
Barcode scanning was introduced at goods-in, on the shop floor and at dispatch, so inventory movements were captured at the source instead of retyped at day's end.
The rollout was phased over five months - finance and inventory first, then purchasing, then production - with each phase run in parallel with the old process until the numbers matched. Role-based training and eight weeks of hypercare followed go-live.
Technology
The stack behind the result
- Custom ERP Suite
- Barcode Scanning
- PostgreSQL
- Power BI
- n8n
“For the first time since we passed a hundred employees, the numbers in the Monday meeting are this morning's numbers. We found two product lines that were quietly losing money and fixed the pricing within a month. The system paid for itself right there.”
- Chief Operating Officer, manufacturing client
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