Industry

Manufacturing Software Development

Production, inventory and quality data in one system.

Manufacturing software has to work in a physical environment. The shop floor has poor connectivity, dust, gloves and machinery, and the people using it cannot stop the line because a page will not load.

It also has to reconcile two very different time scales: the minute-by-minute reality of production and the weekly or monthly rhythm of planning and reporting. Most of the value is in connecting them, so that what actually happened on the line informs what gets planned next.

We build production tracking and job management, inventory and materials movement, quality and non-conformance recording, machine data collection, and the reporting layer that turns all of it into something a planner can use.

Common challenges

What tends to go wrong

Connectivity on the floor is unreliable and the equipment is not always modern. An application that requires a live connection to record a completed operation will be bypassed, and the data will be reconstructed from memory at the end of the shift.Machine integration is heterogeneous. Some equipment exposes a modern protocol, some a serial output, and some nothing at all — meaning a manual step that has to be designed rather than wished away.Traceability requirements mean a batch has to be reconstructable long after it shipped: which materials, which machine, which operator, which quality checks. Systems that store only current state cannot answer that.

How we address it

What we build instead

Floor applications are built offline-first, with everything recorded locally and synchronised when a connection returns. The interface makes pending state visible, because a silent queue is worse than no queue at all, and it is designed for gloved hands and large targets rather than for a desk.Machine data is collected through whatever each piece of equipment supports, normalised into one internal model, with the raw reading retained so a disputed figure can be traced back to what was actually received.Traceability is built as an append-only record of events rather than as a current-state table, so the history of a batch is a query rather than a reconstruction.

Outcomes

What typically improves

Production data arrives as it happens rather than being written up at the end of a shift, which is the difference between planning against reality and planning against recollection.Quality investigations and recalls become bounded exercises, because the record of what went into a batch already exists in a form that can be searched.

Relevant services

How we help manufacturing teams

All services

Frequently asked questions

Can you integrate with our machines?

It depends entirely on what they expose, which varies enormously across a typical shop floor. Modern equipment often speaks OPC UA or MQTT; older equipment may offer a serial output, a file, or nothing. Where there is no interface, the honest answer is a designed manual step rather than a promise of automation, and we would rather say that at the start.

Will it work where there is no wifi?

Yes — offline capability is assumed rather than added. Operations are recorded locally and synchronised when a connection returns, with pending items clearly visible. Building this in from the start is far cheaper than retrofitting it after the first shift where the network dropped.

Do we have to replace our ERP?

Usually not. The common pattern is that the ERP remains the system of record for planning and finance, while shop-floor execution and quality happen in a system built for the environment, feeding back into the ERP. Replacing an ERP is a large undertaking that should have its own justification.

Building for manufacturing?

Tell us how the operation runs today. We will tell you where software would actually help.

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