Software for Manufacturing & Industry | Shopfloor, Excel & SAP

At a glance

Who this is for

Production and manufacturing businesses
Machinery and plant engineering
Suppliers
Metal and plastics processing
Electrical engineering
Food production

Two typical triggers

First, a grown Excel or Access solution next to the ERP with a core process riding on it
Second, paper on the shop floor – job tickets, inspection records, shift logs, fault reports.

What we build

Digital job tickets and shopfloor data capture
Inspection and quality records
Shift handovers
Machine and reporting dashboards
Quoting and calculation applications
Customer portals – integrated with SAP or Business Central

01 — The Excel pattern

Why the spreadsheet appeared – and what it can become.

The pattern is so widespread in manufacturing that it is almost a constant. A simple quote is captured properly in the ERP – that is what the system was built for. A complex quote, on the other hand, is put together in Excel: bespoke work, several variants, surcharges, volume tiers, customer-specific terms. The ERP change that could have handled it was never commissioned, because it was out of all proportion to the benefit. So sales helped itself.

That decision was usually right. What it becomes over the years is not: the file grows, acquires macros, branches into variants, travels between people by email. Eventually a revenue-critical core process depends on a document that is not versioned, whose calculation paths nobody fully knows, and which two people in the business truly master. If one of them leaves, a problem appears that nobody budgeted for.

Our first question is therefore not how to rebuild it, but what it was built for. A grown quoting file is the most honest documentation of a business process a company has – more honest than any manual, because it had to work. We read it, we talk to the people who use it, and in doing so we separate three things: what is genuine domain knowledge, what is historical ballast, and what only exists because Excel forced it.

And then the question that changes the project

It often turns out that the internal replacement is not the most interesting answer at all. If complex quoting runs internally in Excel today and the result then goes to the customer as a PDF, the real question is: could the customer not do this themselves? A customer-facing application in which variants are configured and prices calculated turns internal effort into a sales capability – and a cost centre into a competitive argument.

The same applies to maintenance: with a well-built, AI-assisted tool, your own staff can adjust pricing rules, text modules and variants themselves in future, instead of commissioning a provider for every change. That is the point at which a replacement does not merely pay for itself but changes something.

Step 1

Read the file: which calculation paths, which special cases, which assumptions are in there?

Step 2

Separate: genuine domain knowledge, historical ballast, detours forced by Excel

Step 3

Decide: internal application, customer-facing portal – or the ERP change after all?

Step 4

Build and hand over – maintained by your own people, not by us

What still runs on paper in production.

Usually not out of backwardness, but because nobody ever procured software for these processes – they were “just a form”.

The job ticket travelling with the order

It accompanies the workpiece through production, gets signed off at every station and is filed at the end. Anyone who wants to know where an order stands walks over and looks.

Inspection records on paper

Measurements are read off, noted down and transferred later. Every transfer is a source of error – and in a complaint the folder is supposed to become the evidence.

Shift handover in a logbook

What happened on the night shift is written by hand in a book. Anyone who needs that information two weeks later will not find it.

Fault reports shouted across the shop floor

A machine stops, somebody calls maintenance. How often the same fault occurs and what it costs, nobody knows, because it is recorded nowhere.

Machine data with no analysis

The plant delivers data, but it lands in a system that cannot answer the question production management actually asks.

Setup times and scrap by gut feeling

Without capture at source, optimization decisions are estimates – even when they are made with great conviction.

03 — User stories

What we build for manufacturing and industry.

Concrete use cases from production, quality assurance, maintenance and sales.

“As sales, I want to stop calculating complex quotes in Excel.”

An application with the calculation paths from your grown file – versioned, traceable, usable by several people at once. With pricing rules your own people can maintain.

Excel modernization

“As a customer, I want to configure my variant myself.”

The internal calculation becomes a customer-facing portal: choose variants, see the price, trigger an enquiry. The effort moves from internal sales to the customer – voluntarily, because it is faster for them.

“As an operator, I want to sign off the work step at the terminal.”

A digital job ticket instead of paper: order status in real time, without anyone walking the shop floor. Capture at the station, with a few taps and large buttons.

“As QA, I want to capture measurements where they are taken.”

Inspection records right at the test station with plausibility checks and photo documentation – instead of filling in a form and typing it up later. In a complaint the evidence is there in seconds.

Pharma & Life Sciences

“As maintenance, I want to know which machine really costs us money.”

Capture and analyse fault reports in a structured way: frequency, duration, cause. A shout across the shop floor becomes a number an investment decision can be justified with.

“As production management, I want reporting that answers my question.”

A dashboard over the data that accrues anyway – brought together from the ERP, the machines and manual capture. Cut to the metrics that actually decide things at your plant.

04 — Principles

Why digitalization fails in production – and what we do about it.

Almost never because of the technology. Almost always because capture was built for people sitting at a desk.

Built for gloves and shop floor lighting – Large buttons, few fields, readable in poor light, operable with work gloves. A form that looks elegant in the office is unusable at the machine – and then it stays with the paper slip.
Capture takes seconds, not minutes – Every additional mandatory field lowers the capture rate. We only ask for what gets analysed – and consistently cut everything nobody has looked at for years.
Offline-capable where the network ends – On the shop floor, in basements and at remote sites a connection is not a given. Capture has to work locally and synchronize as soon as there is a signal again.
The ERP stays in charge – SAP or Business Central keep master data and posting. Our application captures and hands over through the existing interfaces – no second system, no duplicate maintenance.
Involve the works council and staff early – Capture in production touches on performance and conduct monitoring. Addressing that only after the build costs months. We raise it early and build with data minimization.
The benefit has to reach the people capturing – Whoever enters data has to get something out of it – a piece of information, a step they no longer have to do, one query fewer. Capture that only benefits management fades out within a few weeks.

Devices

Terminals on the shop floor, tablets and handhelds on the move – web application or native app

Integration

SAP and Business Central via their interfaces – see ERP project management

Modernization

Grown Excel and VBA solutions: legacy modernization

Regulation

For product groups covered by the digital product passport, evidence obligations are added – steel, aluminium, textiles, tyres, furniture

05 — FAQ

Common questions from manufacturing and industry.

Why not simply buy an MES?

If a standard product covers your case: absolutely do that, it is cheaper than anything we build. The reason businesses still end up with us is usually one of two. Either the case is too specific – a calculation logic, an inspection procedure, a customer requirement no standard product knows. Or it is about a single process for which a full MES plus an implementation project would be completely oversized. We say in the first conversation which of the two you are in.

Our quoting sits in a huge Excel file. Can that even be replaced?

Yes, and the effort rarely sits where people expect. Rebuilding the formulas is craft. The actual work is the analysis: working out which calculation paths still hold, which special cases are ballast, and which detours only exist because Excel left no other option. That analysis is what makes the result better than the original – a pure rebuild would just be a more expensive spreadsheet.

What happens to the knowledge of the person who built the file?

That is the most important question in the whole project, and we ask it first. That person is our most important counterpart – not the obstacle but the source. We document the logic while we translate it, so that the knowledge afterwards sits in the system and no longer only in one head. For the person themselves it is usually a relief: they are no longer the single point of failure.

Can you integrate with our SAP?

Yes. We put the application in front of the core system and hand over through its interfaces – with SAP typically via OData or REST services, with Business Central via its API. The core system stays in charge and untouched, which considerably simplifies approvals and avoids the follow-on costs at upgrades.

Does capture in production need works council approval?

In businesses with a works council, systems capable of monitoring conduct or performance practically always require co-determination – and capture in production quickly falls into that category. We raise it early, because it affects the project duration more than any technical decision, and we build with data minimization: what the process does not need is not captured. The employment law assessment belongs with you.

How do we start small?

With one process, one station, one shift. What holds there gets extended; what does not hold has cost little. The most common mistake is to start with the biggest process because that is where the biggest benefit is assumed – but that is also where the largest number of unresolved special cases sits. A small slice in real operation delivers more insight in four weeks than six months of design.

Does the digital product passport affect us?

Possibly. The first ESPR working plan prioritizes iron and steel, aluminium, textiles, tyres, and furniture and mattresses, among others; batteries run under their own battery regulation with a mandatory date from February 2027. What that means for your portfolio is set out in detail on our page about the digital product passport – including the question of which data you would first have to capture for it.

06 — Related

The ERP is expensive to change. So Excel appeared.