Real-time production views on top of your ERP — replace paper orders without replacing the system
Orders printed on A4 and sorted into trays. Assembly times nobody measures. Multi-level product structures forcing operators to report in exact sequence. We design visualisation layers on top of the existing ERP four connected views that replace paper, capture real times as a by-product, and never touch the ERP itself.
Challenge
The problem pattern.
In make-to-order assembly, every order is printed on A4 and placed in a tray by the station — sometimes a year before delivery. Products have multi-level structures, the ERP demands a separate manufacturing order per sub-structure, and the operator must report each one in exactly the right sequence or the terminal refuses. No actual assembly times are recorded anywhere — planning runs on guesses.
The operators are skilled at assembly. It's the administration around them that makes the flow slow — and the planning blind.
Solution
What we build.
A visualisation and planning layer on top of the existing ERP — not a new business system, and deliberately no AI involved, so it can be introduced regardless of where the customer's AI policy stands.
- Report on the main structure. A virtual umbrella over main and sub-articles lets the operator mark one order number as done — the system handles the sub-structures, and the sequence requirement disappears.
- Real-time views instead of paper. Touch-friendly digital views per station where changes propagate instantly.
- Time data as a by-product. Every start/done tap generates actual time per assembly — planning becomes grounded in reality, gradually and automatically.
- Everything in the customer's own environment. Deployed in their cloud tenant or on a local server; no data leaves; the customer owns the code.
Four connected views: a production overview for management (this week's deliveries, alerts, station load), a workshop overview for the floor (status per station), an operator view (my orders, batching across orders, start/done), and a dispatch view (weight, volume, delivery status — digital instead of pencilled on paper).
Architecture
How it’s put together.
- Read-only integration against the ERP's API, validated against the customer's test environment
- Application logic for the umbrella structures, batching, time capture, and per-station ownership of articles
- Write-back to the ERP as a defined add-on, never a day-one requirement
Value
What it’s worth.
This is positioned and priced as a platform engagement: a fixed start-up fee, a flat monthly fee covering operations, SLA and all further development at zero cost — spread across a 25-person production team it works out to a few hundred kronor per person per month. One avoided late delivery is break-even. Live within 3–5 weeks of project start.
Questions about production views
Can we get live production visibility without replacing our ERP?
Yes. The views sit on top of the ERP and read from it, and nothing is written back beyond the reporting operators already do. The ERP stays the single record, there is no migration, and paper can disappear one station at a time. Real assembly times come out as a by-product of the reporting rather than as a separate job for somebody.