An Enterprise ERP Platform For Manufacturing Operations.

A manufacturing group needed an ERP platform that matched how their operation was actually organised. Manufacturing businesses tend to run on a mix of a general-purpose ERP, a set of spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge held by a small number of people.

The brief was to replace that arrangement with a single system, without forcing the business to reorganise itself around software that was designed for someone else's factory.

Generic ERP fits a generic manufacturer. Real operations carry exceptions — the process that runs differently for one product line, the approval that depends on who is on shift, the report that only makes sense in this group's terms.

Configuring a packaged ERP to hold those exceptions is where these projects usually go wrong: the customisation becomes its own maintenance burden, and the business ends up working around the system it paid to adopt.

The alternative — building a platform around the operation as it exists — carries its own risk. It only works if the system is structured so that the parts most likely to change can change independently.

We modelled the operation before writing the platform, so that the structure reflected the group's real process rather than a standard manufacturing template.

The build was phased. Each phase delivered a working part of the system the business could use and judge, which kept the scope of any single mistake small and gave the client something to react to throughout rather than only at the end.

Stated qualitatively, and without identifying detail, in line with the client's confidentiality requirements.