# Manufacturing ERP

> Custom ERP for a steel manufacturer that had outgrown AutoCount and could not customise it any further.

**Sector:** Steel manufacturer
**Year:** 2024
**Role:** Team of seven
**Stack:** C#, .NET, MySQL
**Runs on:** Self-hosted
**What it does:** Production to accounts — no reconciliation between

## The problem

The client ran on AutoCount and had reached the end of what it could be customised to do. Their production process did not fit the package, which leaves two options. Run the real process outside the system, or bend the business to the software. They were paying for both. Procurement, inventory and accounting stayed separate exercises reconciled by hand downstream of it.

## What we built

An ERP built to the operation rather than to a package: production planning and execution, procurement, inventory and accounting in one self-hosted system. Production is the part that justified building rather than buying, because it is the part no off-the-shelf package was going to fit; once it was modelled properly, everything downstream of it had a single source of truth instead of a reconciliation.

## Outcome

- Replaced AutoCount, which could not be customised further to fit the production process.
- Production, procurement, inventory and accounting run in one system rather than as separate exercises reconciled by hand.
- The production process is modelled as the client actually runs it, rather than as the package required it to be described.

## The long version

Off-the-shelf accounting packages are good software. The reason a business
outgrows one is almost never accounting. It is that the package has a fixed
idea of how goods come into existence, and a manufacturer whose process does
not match that idea ends up describing their real work in the package's terms
and keeping the real version somewhere else. That somewhere else is usually a
spreadsheet, and it is usually the thing the business actually runs on.

The build started at production for that reason, not at accounting. Once
production is modelled the way the floor actually works, procurement stops
being a guess, inventory stops needing a reconciliation, and accounting is
downstream of facts rather than of re-entry. The other order is the tempting
one, because accounting is the part that already exists. It would have produced
a tidier ledger sitting on top of the same disconnect.


[Overcode](https://overcode.io/) — AI workflows and custom systems. This study as HTML: https://overcode.io/work/manufacturing-erp/