Trades · Manufacturing, fabrication and engineering
Technology for manufacturers in Leicestershire
On paper, small manufacturers run MRP: Katana, MRPeasy, sometimes Sage 200 or Business Central. In practice, most run Excel plus Sage 50 plus one person who knows where everything is. Both versions have the same three problems.
The three pains we keep finding
Production status lives on a whiteboard
What's running, what's next, what's stuck waiting on materials: it's on the board, in the morning meeting, and in the supervisor's head. When the supervisor is off, the factory runs on guesswork.
Stock figures nobody trusts
The system says 40, the shelf says 12, so everyone counts by hand before quoting a delivery date. Once stock can't be trusted, every other number downstream of it can't be either.
Quoting from gut feel
Actual job costs never make it back to whoever writes the quotes. The jobs that lose money get re-quoted at the same price for years, and nobody can prove it because the data is scattered across three systems.
What we typically build for manufacturers
- A production board on a TV: what's running, what's next, what's blocked. About a week.
- Numbers out of Sage 50 and onto a screen: sales, debt, cash, live. About a week.
- Actual costs against quoted, by job and customer, fed back to whoever quotes. One to two weeks.
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One honest note
If the whiteboard works, keep the whiteboard. A screen only earns its place when the answer needs to be current in more than one room, or when the person holding it in their head deserves a holiday.
Run a factory?
Tell us which number you don't trust. A first conversation costs nothing.