[xupybd]

Having moved from external consult to in house dev this is so true. Most of our production systems are just spreadsheets that get emailed on schedule or trigger.

We have no web stack, no authentication required. No complex UI or UX.

It's so simple, our production manager and I sat down and came up with the system. It works very well and took a few weeks to get up and running. It would have taken months to solve the same problems with a typical web based interactive system. It's also less work and upskilling for users.

[prox]

That sounds deliciously simple.

Same with a search for a to-do app I was looking for. Until I was thinking my file explorer was already great at filing, so I just add txt files and so on to order my projects. Naming is key if you want it to work well though.

I use Joplin for some more complex things, like keeping track of certain project features and progress.

[leandot]

Curious to hear more about that system. What do you do with those spreadsheets?

[xupybd]

It's all pretty simple. We manufacturer physical goods. Some high volume, some custom designs in an online designer with a 2 day turn around. It's all B2B.

This means various parts of our manufacturing process happen over different plants and different teams. Everyone needs to be in sync and working on the right thing. Most of the manufacturing is automated. Machine instructions are generated as orders come in. The emails send supervisors lists of what has to be worked on in that shift and department. Also they get checklists for QC, and packing instructions.

All data entry is done by scanning stickers that are generated with machine instructions and printed at manufacturing time. There is a little bit of extra info typed in for dispatch and off cut management.

It's all feed from an off the shelf ERP. Most would heavily customize the ERP. We simply hooked Jasper reports server to the db and built some custom reports. We do have some code feeding data back to the ERP.

I hope that sheds some light?