A manufacturing business running three plants had grown past the systems it started with. Stock lived in one package, production scheduling in spreadsheets, and billing in a third tool that nobody else could see into. Each was internally consistent and none of them agreed with the others.
70%
Manual entry removed
Live
Reporting, not month-end
2025
Delivered
ERP
Discipline
The problem
Stock, production and billing tracked in three systems that never agreed.
Stock valuation differed between the inventory system and the accounts, with no reliable way to say which was right
Production schedules were rebuilt manually each week from a stock position that was already a day old
Month-end reporting took the better part of a week, so decisions ran on numbers that were three weeks stale
Four spellings of several suppliers, and item codes whose units had quietly changed meaning years earlier
The approach
A month spent documenting how material, money and information actually moved — including the exceptions everyone worked around but nobody had written down. That produced a shortlist of what was genuinely unusual and needed customising, and a much longer list that could take the standard path.
Suppliers, items and opening balances were deduplicated and reconciled with owners assigned from the client's team, because only they could say which of four near-identical supplier records was the real one. This was scheduled as real work rather than assumed away.
One module taken all the way to production before anything else was configured. Stock is the data every other module depends on, and the feedback loop is immediate — the count is either right or it is not.
Old and new ran together until both agreed on stock valuation and open orders across a full cycle. The cutover happened on that test passing, not on a date in the plan.
The remaining modules followed the same shape — configure, migrate, parallel run, cut over — moving faster because the master data was clean and the team already knew the system. Reporting was built last, against a schema that had stopped moving.
The outcome
One platform with live inventory, production jobs and GST-ready invoicing.
Around 70% of duplicate manual data entry eliminated across stock, production and billing
Stock position and valuation available live rather than reconstructed at month end
GST-compliant invoicing generated directly from despatch, removing a separate re-keying step
One supplier and item master, with standards owned internally after handover
“The first month was the hardest and it was the data, not the software. Once that was clean the rest went faster than we expected.”
Capabilities used
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ReadTell us where the manual work is and we will show you what removing it looks like — scope, sequence and what it costs, before you commit to anything.
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