We run a garment unit. For years we had the same problems as everyone else. We couldn't see production until the shift was over, delays came with no reason attached, quality problems turned up at finishing, and we only knew the labour cost of an order after the month closed.
It was harder to accept because software is our other job. We'd spent years building it for other businesses, and the tools to fix this already existed. Nobody had put them together for a factory like ours.
Friends and family who run electrical, electronics and automotive units told us the same story: counts kept in registers and on WhatsApp, and a phone call at 8 am to find out what happened. Their ERP stayed in the accounts office, and the MES systems they looked at were priced for much bigger plants.
So we built our own. Operators enter their work on a phone at the station, and the supervisor, the stores and the office see the same numbers straight away.