The Situation
The manufacturer ran a real, growing business on top of a fragile data layer: a sprawl of spreadsheets, a few legacy desktop tools, and a lot of paper passing between two facilities. Inventory counts lived in one file, production schedules in another, and reconciling them meant someone manually stitching numbers together — usually a day behind reality.
With roughly 80 employees split across two plants, that lag had real costs. A supervisor at one facility couldn't see what the other was producing without a phone call. Raw-material shortages surfaced too late. Month-end reporting was a scramble of copying cells between workbooks, and the numbers rarely fully agreed. As order volume grew, the spreadsheet approach was quietly becoming the ceiling on how much business they could take on.
They didn't need a heavyweight enterprise suite built for thousands of users. They needed a focused, custom ERP that matched how their two facilities actually worked, that everyone could learn quickly, and that gave management a single, trustworthy view of the operation.
What We Did
We built a custom ERP on Next.js with Postgres and Prisma, scoped tightly to the workflows that mattered and designed to be approachable for a non-technical workforce.
The v1 covered four core areas:
- Inventory management. Raw materials and finished goods moved into a single real-time ledger, with stock levels, locations, and movements tracked per facility. Reorder thresholds surfaced shortages before they stopped a line.
- Production tracking. We modeled the production process so jobs could be logged, updated, and monitored as they moved through each plant. Both facilities now report into the same system, so status is visible everywhere instantly.
- Multi-facility data model. The schema was built around two locations from the start, so transfers, plant-specific stock, and cross-site reporting are first-class rather than bolted on.
- Reporting. Management dashboards and exportable reports replaced the month-end spreadsheet ritual with numbers drawn directly from the live database.
We rolled out in phases against real operational data, training staff on each module as it landed so adoption kept pace with the build.
The Results
The biggest change was structural: dozens of disconnected spreadsheets collapsed into one source of truth spanning both facilities. Production status that used to be a day old is now visible in real time, so a manager can see exactly what each plant is running without a single phone call.
All ~80 employees now work from the same platform, and month-end reporting that once meant hours of copying cells comes straight from the database. Delivered as a focused v1 in 12 weeks, the ERP gave the manufacturer the operational headroom to take on more orders without adding administrative overhead — and a foundation to extend as the business grows.
