A cost per unit you can defend, from the floor to the ledger.

The numbers get lost between the floor and the office.

A bill of materials in a spreadsheet that no longer matches what the line uses. Stock that is right on Monday and wrong by Thursday, because issues to production are booked in one batch at month end. A cost per unit worked out once, a year ago. A quality check written on paper, if anyone writes it at all.

When a customer asks which raw-material batch went into their order, finding out takes a day of searching. On a sound record it is one report.

The production record runs from raw material to customer.

ERPNext's manufacturing module holds multi-level bills of materials, work orders created from them, job cards for each operation at a workstation, production planning against demand, and quality inspections on incoming goods, in process and before dispatch. Stock carries batches with expiry dates and serial numbers, with a traceability report from raw material to the customer who received it.

We configure it around your line, meaning your routings, your scrap and rework, your units of measure, and the reports your accountant and your production manager each need. CRM & ERP on ERPNext covers the rest of the core. There is no per-seat licence, so a new supervisor on the floor adds no licence fee.

Most of the work before go-live is data: item codes, bills of materials and opening stock cleaned and reconciled before anyone relies on them. That is data readiness, and it decides whether the first month's costs can be trusted.

A camera on the line posts its inspections to the job card.

• Counting. Units, cartons or pallets counted continuously as they pass, and reconciled against the work order's quantity.
• Presence and labelling. A label present, legible and right for the batch, and a missing or wrong label flagged while it can still be fixed.
• Packing and visible defects. Damage, missing components and packing errors a camera can see, each detection scored, with anything below the threshold sent to a person.
• Only the record leaves. A small machine at your site runs the model, and what reaches the ERP is a quality inspection against the job card. The footage stays on site.

Most existing IP cameras will do, and where a camera sits and how the station is lit matter more than the model behind it. If a camera cannot see the defect, you hear that before any software is bought. Accuracy is measured on a few hours of your own footage first, and computer vision & OCR sets out the method.

Nothing that controls a machine or protects a person.

No PLC or SCADA programming, no machine guarding or safety interlocks, and no automated decision where being wrong could injure somebody. A camera in our systems flags and records, and it never stops a line.

That work belongs to certified suppliers and your own engineers, and we are not one of them. We say so on the first call.

From a shift on the floor to a parallel month.

• A shift on the floor. Watching one product move from raw material to dispatch, and noting every place a figure is written down.
• Data readiness. Items, bills of materials, routings and opening stock cleaned and reconciled before they go in.
• Core setup and dry run. ERPNext configured, and a month of production replayed in a staging copy.
• Camera pilot on one station. A few hours of footage, a measured baseline, then thresholds agreed with the person who owns quality.
• Parallel month. Both ways until stock and cost agree, then the old spreadsheet is retired.

Stock movements, purchase approvals and reorder alerts are then wired together with workflow automation. Manufacturers who also trade finished goods should read the trading page. The engagement is one fixed price, warranted like everything we host.