Manufacturing & engineering
From whiteboard planning to real production data
Plenty of factories run a good ERP for accounts and a whiteboard for production. The gap between them is where delivery dates slip and true costs stay unknown.
What usually hurts
- Production plan out of date by the middle of the shift
- Paper job cards typed into a spreadsheet, then typed in again
- Rejection data collected but never analysed, so the same defects repeat
- Job costing that arrives too late to change any decision
What I build for you
Shop-floor capture
Operators log jobs on a tablet with a barcode scan. Entered once, at the source, by the person who actually knows.
Live production planning
A plan that updates as work completes, with machine and material availability visible before you promise a date.
Quality and defect analysis
Rejection reasons coded and trended so recurring root causes become obvious instead of averaging out.
Real job costing
Material, labour and overhead against each job as it runs — so you find out during the job, not at the year end.
What the first three months look like
Every business is different, but this is the shape most engagements in this industry take.
- Weeks 1–2
Walk the floor
Follow a job from order to dispatch, watching where paper is created, re-typed or lost. The whiteboard and the job card tell you most of what you need.
- Weeks 3–5
Digitise capture at source
Tablet-based job cards with barcode job selection, so the operator enters it once and nobody re-types anything afterwards.
- Weeks 6–9
Planning and quality
A production plan that updates as work completes, plus coded rejection reasons so recurring defects become visible instead of averaging out.
- Weeks 10–12
Costing and reporting
Material, labour and overhead against each job as it runs, with the owner's weekly pack building itself.
Services that fit this industry
Manufacturing: common questions
Usually not, and I would rather you did not. A lot of manufacturers have a serviceable ERP for accounts and a gap on the shop floor. Building the shop-floor layer and feeding clean data into what you already own protects your earlier investment.
They will if it is faster than the paper they use now, and only then. That means barcode selection instead of typing, big touch targets, and a screen that works with gloves and poor light. I test this with the actual operators before rolling anything out.
Yes, and it is usually the biggest surprise. Once material, labour and overhead are captured against each job as it runs, most manufacturers discover that their assumptions about which products make money were wrong for at least a few lines.
Other industries I work in
Pharmacy & healthcare retail chains
Built for batch, expiry, licences and thin margins
Retail & multi-store businesses
One live view across every branch
Travel agencies & tour operators
Bookings, costing, commissions and settlements in one place
Want to talk about manufacturing?
Thirty minutes, no sales pitch. Just a straight read on your situation.