A manufacturer we worked with had an ERP that was, on paper, complete. It held the sales orders, the purchase orders and the financials. What it did not have was any honest connection to the shop floor. Production was planned in the system and then executed on paper, and the two drifted apart over the course of every shift. Schedules were optimistic because the routings behind them were wrong, and finance could never close work orders cleanly because the costs that came back never matched the plan.
They did not need a new ERP. They needed the one they had to know what was actually happening on the machines — and that meant fixing the master data first and the integration second.
The challenges we had to solve
- Bills of material that had not been maintained against engineering changes, so the system was planning to build last year’s product.
- Routings with run times that were guesses, producing schedules nobody on the floor believed or followed.
- An MES layer that collected machine data but did not feed it back to the ERP in any usable form.
- Work-order costs that never reconciled, because actual consumption and time were never captured against the order.
How we approached it
We started on the floor, not in the system. With the production engineers we rebuilt the BOMs against the current drawings and timed the routings against how the work is genuinely done, work centre by work centre. It is slow, but a schedule is only as good as the routings under it, and there is no shortcut that survives contact with a real shift.
Then we built the integration between the MES and the ERP so that work-order issue, completion and actual time flowed back automatically, rather than being keyed in later from a clipboard. We kept the interface deliberately narrow — the data the ERP actually needs to plan and cost, and no more — so it was something the plant could rely on rather than another fragile bridge to babysit.
Where it stands
The schedule the ERP produces now resembles what the floor can actually do, because the routings behind it are real. Work orders close against actual consumption and time, so finance can cost a job and believe the answer. Planners and supervisors are working from the same picture for the first time, instead of reconciling two versions of the day after it has already happened.