Most manufacturers can tell you last month's revenue to the dollar and their true cost per unit only approximately. That gap decides which quotes you win, which products quietly lose money, and whether the plant's improvement work shows up in the accounts. We connect the shop floor to the ledger so the number is real.
The plant floor generates enormous quantities of data and, in most operations, remarkably little of it reaches the person deciding whether to accept an order at a given price. Manufacturing technology earns its keep when it closes that loop — when what actually happened at the machine changes what you quote, what you schedule and what you stock. The sub-sectors below run that loop differently.
Bills of material, routings, work orders and configure-to-order complexity, with cost rolled from the operation up rather than estimated down.
Formulas, batches, potency and yield variance, co-products and by-products, and the lot genealogy a recall demands.
Quoting from real historical cost, mixed-mode production, and the job-level profitability that tells you which customers are worth keeping.
Configure-price-quote for engineered products, project-based delivery, installation, and an installed base that should be generating service revenue.
Shelf life and rotation, allergen and specification control, co-packing, and retailer compliance requirements that change without notice.
Full traceability, revision and configuration control, certification records, and audit evidence that has to hold years after the part shipped.
Manufacturing returns come from four places, in roughly this order of reliability. Inventory: carrying less of it because you can finally see what you have and what is committed. Quoting: winning better work because your cost basis is real rather than a standard nobody has updated since 2019. Throughput: schedule adherence improving because planning uses actual capacity rather than an optimistic assumption. And service: aftermarket revenue that most manufacturers already have sitting in their installed base and have never systematically pursued. We build the case from whichever you can measure today.
Manufacturers typically have more systems than any other sector we work in, and less connection between them.
Demand and supply planning, MRP, work orders, inventory, warehouse and cost accounting. This is the spine, and it is where a fragmented estate hurts most — because a wrong inventory number is wrong in six places at once.
What actually happened at the machine: run time, downtime, scrap, yield and operator activity. Frequently rich, frequently trapped, and almost always disconnected from the cost model.
Inspection plans, non-conformance, corrective action, certificates of analysis and lot or serial genealogy — the evidence you need within hours when a customer or a regulator asks.
Pipeline, product configuration, quoting from real cost, and the installed-base service operation that turns a one-time sale into a recurring revenue stream.
Four problems we hear in nearly every plant, and the outcome the leadership team is really after.
The system says one thing, the floor says another, and everyone plans around a safety buffer that costs real working capital. Physical counts are a periodic ordeal that resets the discrepancy without explaining it.
The outcome leaders ask forInventory accuracy high enough to plan from, with cycle counting replacing the annual shutdown and working capital released from buffers you no longer need.Standard costs were set some time ago and updated rarely. Sales quotes from them, finance reports against them, and the variance is explained after the quarter rather than acted on during it.
The outcome leaders ask forActual cost by product and by run feeding the quoting process, so pricing decisions are made on what production really costs today.The schedule assumes capacity the plant does not have, because it does not know about the changeover, the maintenance window or the operator who is out. Expediting becomes the actual planning method.
The outcome leaders ask forSchedule adherence that improves measurably, with capacity constraints and downtime reflected in the plan rather than discovered on the shift.A customer asks which lots contained a specific material. Answering means several people, several days and a certain amount of hope. In a recall, that is the difference between a contained event and an uncontained one.
The outcome leaders ask forLot and serial genealogy queryable in minutes, forwards and backwards, with the evidence pack producible on demand.The common thread is that the plant knows things the business systems do not. Closing that gap is usually a data and integration problem rather than a machinery problem, which makes it much cheaper to solve than most executives expect. Closing that gap is usually a data and integration problem rather than a machinery problem
We baseline from your existing inventory, schedule adherence and margin data before agreeing a target.
Working capital released as accuracy and visibility improve
Achievable with cycle counting and disciplined transactions
Improvement when planning uses real capacity and downtime
Where quoting moves onto an accurate cost basis
Time to trace genealogy forwards and backwards
Growth from systematically serving the installed base
How to read these: How to read these: the figures above are typical ranges we plan and measure against, not guarantees. In your first engagement we agree the baseline, the target and the measurement method in writing, then report against them.
Most engagements start with cost and inventory visibility, because everything else is argued from those numbers.
The operational spine: demand and supply planning, inventory accuracy, work order execution and a cost model that reflects reality.
Inspection, non-conformance and genealogy captured in the flow of production rather than recorded afterwards.
The revenue most manufacturers are already entitled to and rarely pursue systematically.
Implementation, extension, support and integration across Supply Chain Management, Finance and the service applications — with the shop floor connected rather than assumed.
Environment design, data migration, configuration, testing and go-live for the Dynamics 365 applications your operation actually needs — to a fixed price and a fixed date. For a plant that means going live by site or by production line, with a cutover planned around your shutdown calendar rather than a convenient month end.
Where the standard product stops short, we extend it with model-driven apps, Power Apps, Power Automate flows and custom tables rather than bolting on a separate system. Routings, formulas, quality plans and costing rules are configured as data your own planners and engineers maintain, because production changes faster than any change-request process.
Managed application support after go-live: a named team, an agreed response time, release management for Microsoft's twice-yearly waves, and a backlog we work through with you. Production-hours coverage. A planning system that is down during a shift is a production problem, not a ticket, and we agree response times on that basis.
Connecting Dynamics 365 to the systems you are keeping — with monitored, re-runnable interfaces and a documented contract for every field that moves. Interfaces to MES, SCADA, machine data, EDI trading partners and shipping systems, with monitoring so a failed message is caught before it becomes a missed shipment.
We are deliberately cautious about connecting business systems to production control. Reading machine data to inform planning and costing is straightforward and valuable. Writing back to anything that controls a machine is a different risk class, and we will tell you when a proposal has crossed that line.
What each application genuinely does for a manufacturing operation.
The core: master planning, work order execution, bills of material and routings, warehouse management with barcode scanning, and the multi-site inventory picture that makes planning possible. Handles discrete, process and mixed-mode production in one model.
Cost accounting that reconciles to production activity, standard versus actual variance analysis by cause, product and customer profitability, and the multi-entity consolidation that multi-plant groups need.
Asset registry with full service history, preventive maintenance contracts, technician scheduling with skills and parts availability, and a mobile app that works in a plant basement with no signal.
Pipeline and quoting connected to real product cost and real available capacity, so a promised date is one operations can actually meet and a quoted margin is one finance will recognise.
Shop-floor data capture, quality inspection forms, maintenance requests, downtime logging and supplier scorecards — built as apps on tablets and scanners inside your existing tenant.
We are deliberately cautious about connecting business systems to production control. Reading machine data to inform planning and costing is straightforward and valuable. Writing back to anything that controls a machine is a different risk class, and we will tell you when a proposal has crossed that line.
Manufacturing punishes consultants who design from a process document. The process document and the plant are rarely the same thing.
We follow a product through the plant, from order to shipment, and watch what really happens.
We agree outcomes with operations, finance, quality and IT in one room, and write the metrics down.
We prototype the cost model and the planning approach and test them against last quarter's real data.
We build, integrate, migrate and train — by site or line, sequenced around your shutdown calendar.
We measure inventory, adherence and margin against the baseline, then tune what the data shows.
We validate the cost model against a period you have already closed before anything goes live. If our numbers cannot reproduce your last quarter, the model is wrong and we would rather find that in design than in your first month end.
Manufacturing consulting fails when the consultants have never stood on a shop floor during a bad shift.
The value is not in a production system or a finance system. It is in the connection between them, which is exactly where most implementations stop short and where margin visibility actually lives.
If a transaction takes an operator too long, it will be batched at the end of the shift or skipped, and your inventory accuracy will never recover. Shop-floor usability is a hard design constraint for us.
MES, SCADA, scales, scanners, EDI and legacy line controllers. We integrate with what is on your floor rather than requiring you to replace it to suit the software.
Applications, integration, the network and the managed service afterwards from one accountable team — which matters when a plant issue at 2am needs somebody who owns the whole picture.
Two illustrative engagements showing the shape of the work.
Quotes were built from standard costs last reviewed years earlier. Some long-running accounts were being served at a loss and nobody could prove which, because job-level actuals were never rolled up.
A customer query about a specific ingredient lot required three people and two days of spreadsheet work. In a genuine recall scenario that timeline was, in the operations director's words, indefensible.
Practical pieces on the decisions plant and finance leadership share.
How to move quoting onto actual cost without disrupting the month end, and what to instrument first.
Read moreWhy plans fail against capacity that was never real, and the three inputs that fix most of it.
Read moreMost manufacturers know what they shipped and not what it is doing now. A practical route to recurring service revenue.
Read morePick a product family and give us a real bill of material and routing. We will build a working demo of planning, work order execution and cost roll-up for that line, using your part numbers, and walk your operations and finance leads through it together.
Describe the situation in your own words.
