Manufacturing ERP and Production Management System

Most small and mid-sized factories price from an estimated cost set years ago. Since then raw material prices have moved, scrap has risen on one line, and run times have stretched on another. The result is products sold at a thinner margin than management believes, and others priced higher than they should be, losing orders.

The system costs from reality: the materials actually issued to the order, the labour and machine hours recorded, and the overheads allocated. It then compares that with standard and shows where the variance came from: material price, excess scrap or longer time. Pricing turns from a guess into a decision.

Ready-made systems with a manufacturing module are a good choice when your production is standard: fixed products with fixed bills of materials. But cost them over three years, with annual per-user licences and implementation and customisation fees, not on the first month’s subscription.

Custom wins when your factory has its own logic: a product calculated from dimensions and profiles, pricing that depends on material weight and the day’s price, toll manufacturing, or by-products from the same process. Bending a ready-made system to these cases often costs more than building them directly. And with a custom system you own the code and the data, and growth isn’t tied to the number of licences.

There is a middle path too: if your accounting software is good we keep it, build the production, planning and costing modules, and connect them to it.

Every movement in the factory has an accounting effect: material issue, work in progress, receipt of finished goods, sale. The entries are posted automatically, so the stock value in the books matches what is actually in the warehouse. Sales invoices are issued in line with ZATCA’s e-invoicing requirements, integrated with the Fatoora platform for businesses in scope.

On the shop floor we connect scales, barcode scanners and label printers. Reading data from the machines themselves is possible where the machine or its controller exposes a data output, and we assess that machine by machine instead of making a blanket promise. Over WhatsApp, management gets the alerts that matter: a material below minimum, an order behind schedule, a machine stopped.

A make-to-order factory needs everything to start from the quotation: the customer’s specification becomes a bill of materials and an estimated cost, then a sales order, then a production order that carries the order number through every stage to delivery. The salesperson knows what stage their customer’s order is at without phoning the factory.

A make-to-stock factory needs the opposite: a demand forecast, a minimum level for each finished item, and a weekly production plan that fills stock with the fewest changeovers. Many factories combine both, and the system supports both on one database.

Accurate bills of materials are the foundation of everything: planning, issuing and costing. If they aren’t documented, documenting them is the first task in the project, and we help with it.

The first mistake is trying to schedule every machine to the minute from day one. Start with production orders, issue and receipt, and leave detailed scheduling for a later phase once the data has settled. The second is going live on stock balances that haven’t been counted, so the whole material plan is built on wrong numbers.

The third is ignoring the line supervisor. If the production entry screen has ten fields, it won’t be filled in. When comparing quotes, ask: are actual costing and variance analysis in scope? Is batch traceability included? Is there a licence per user? And who owns the code?