[barbinbrad]

Hey I'd love to learn more about your thoughts. We have a discord if you'd like to join.

I see the market like this: - small job shops and startups are using it now (we have 5 customers today using it to run operations) - mid-market manufacturers with 200-ish employees are where i'd like to go, but many want all the accounting baked in and that's still a WIP - large players have to use SAP for accounting because they have multiple-ledgers, but i see this as a good "custom MES starting point"

[rancar2]

TLDR Brad: I’d suggest you look at any customers with potential scale, who should have a custom SKU/BOM/order mix. 3D printing and full custom made to order products will have this mix, and it gets increasing painful when scaling past 100s of orders per month. One will find there will be in-house systems and workaround to deal with this complication, which should be fixed decently once a company is in the 1000s of orders per month by necessity of survival.

A bit more background as there is various bits of advice in these threads, and I will provide my take with scaling such a startup. Third-Party ERPs from the big vendors are purchased by Finance and are needed for validation pre-IPO and into the IPO (no one is going to trust something else without proof of success in publicly traded companies and it will be a red flag if there is no use cases in reputable publicly traded companies). ERPs are financial focused (like EHRs in healthcare), and their vendors will happily upsell the other addons like MES/BOMs, which are fine for generic manufacturing with limited SKUs. However in a world of customized/personalized SKUs, traditional ERP/finances solutions cannot be easily used to run manufacturing operations. I’d recommend focusing on integrating into ERPs (tack on custom IDs to the related objects) and automating them rather than building the full financial accounting/taxes into the platform. For example, your platform will still track the BOM details, but the totals will get synced for overall financial reporting for the various ledgers and not all the sub-assemblies which the ledgers don’t care about. This keeps the MES purpose built (and the big vendor ERP keeping simple books) and the ultimate source of truth what’s happening on the floor without getting into the accounting details that matter for tax optimization and not manufacturing operations.

[barbinbrad]

really well said, imo! it's interesting how there's two views of ERP. one is a G/L + anything needed to support it. and the other is more of a tool that supports operations and planning. i started with a G/L, but have kept it hidden even now, because my thought it that everything else should be good first, and support the G/L second.

[rancar2]

Operations and planning are performed when one’s company fits the mold of a classic business. The system you are building suits the companies that break the mold, which is a growing number as personalization/hyper customization grows.

[robertlagrant]

Can you give an example of mold-breaking?

[rancar2]

3D print manufactures that print custom parts need to use their manufacturing and billing operation outside the mold. Unixhero provided another example, but there are a lot of examples where big ERPs aren’t the right solution and/or require a lot of money/customization/ongoing costs to make it work well beyond its total ROI.

[unixhero]

Anything which needs detailed operations planning of the production. Larger factories and say chemical companies use standard flows of the ERP (SAP) for this.

[djfobbz]

I worked on a very similar system for a friend's laser fab shop using the Roda framework (Ruby). Since Tailwind wasn't available at the time, I had to rely on Bootstrap. The project was quite similar to what you've done, although I stopped short of implementing job scheduling and live job tracking. I really love your execution...especially the UI.

I eventually handed my project over to another firm to continue development, as I became occupied with other, larger projects. It's still in use at my friend's shop, which now has about 80 employees.

I would still love to take another stab at it as I really wanted the system to have the ability to parse 3D files, for unfolding and automated quoting. Does your system already handle that? I browsed through your videos and saw that you at least had the preview part of it working.

[calvinmorrison]

Gotta have your G/L tied to your whole system. How else can you do project billing or Make-To-order quoting and have it roll your Cogs and such over to the G/L....