ERP Development
Operational backbones that fit your business, not a template industry.
Manufacturing · 2024
Modernizing a 19-year-old ERP without replacing it
A precision components manufacturer was quoting from costs that were months out of date. Rather than a replacement program, we modernized incrementally around the existing system.
- Client
- Precision components manufacturer
- Duration
- 14 months
- Services
- 4 practices involved
Placeholder content. These engagement details illustrate structure and formatting. They are not reported client results and will be replaced with verified client stories before this site goes live.
Results
- Inventory accuracy, up from 82%
- 97.8%Inventory accuracy, up from 82%
- Job costing, previously four to six weeks
- Same dayJob costing, previously four to six weeks
- Gross margin after quote model correction
- +6.4 ptsGross margin after quote model correction
- Unplanned production stoppages during rollout
- 0Unplanned production stoppages during rollout
The challenge
What was actually going wrong
The manufacturer ran on an ERP implemented nineteen years earlier and customized heavily since. It held accurate financial data but had no usable interface for the shop floor, so production tracking happened on paper travelers keyed in at week's end.
The consequence was costing that lagged reality by weeks. During a period of volatile material pricing the company was quoting from standard costs set months earlier, and analysis later showed several product lines had been sold below cost for an extended period.
Two previous replacement attempts had failed. One was abandoned after eighteen months and a substantial write-off, which had understandably made leadership wary of another large program.
Our approach
How we worked the problem
- 01
Rule out replacement honestly
Our assessment concluded the ERP was fit for finance and unfit for operations. Replacing all of it to fix half of it carried risk the business had already demonstrated it could not absorb.
- 02
Build an integration layer first
A documented service layer over the ERP gave us a stable interface to build against and isolated everything downstream from the legacy system's structure.
- 03
Start with shop floor capture
Ruggedized scanning terminals replaced paper travelers for job start, completion and material issue. Designed for gloves and under five seconds per scan, they reached full adoption in three weeks.
- 04
Rebuild costing on real data
With actual labor and material consumption flowing in continuously, costing moved from month-old standards to current actuals, and quoting was rebuilt on top of it.
- 05
Then scheduling, then analytics
Each module went live and stabilized before the next began. Nothing was attempted in parallel, which is why nothing failed.
The outcome
What changed afterward
The margin improvement came primarily from identifying and repricing work that had been quoted below cost — a problem the business knew existed but could not locate without accurate current costing.
The ERP remains in place. Leadership now describes the modernization as a series of small, individually reversible changes, which is what made it possible to proceed after two failed replacement attempts.
“The previous attempts failed because they asked us to bet the company on a single cutover. This one never did.”
Keep exploring
Services used in this engagement
Enterprise Application Development
Systems that satisfy security, compliance and a thousand users.
Data Engineering
Pipelines that deliver correct data on time, every time.
Business Intelligence
One version of the numbers, available when decisions get made.
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