Manufacturing ERP With Real Shop-Floor Visibility
Manufacturing ERP covering BOM, production planning, machine downtime, quality control and costing.
What is broken today
- Production plans in spreadsheets, actuals on paper
- Machine downtime discovered in the monthly review
- True cost per unit is an estimate
What you get
- BOM, routing and work-order execution
- Live shop-floor status and downtime capture
- Quality checks with non-conformance tracking
- Actual cost per batch and per unit
Live demo: this exact solution
Six Mile Motor Works
A motor-works spares counter running its parts catalogue, stock levels and movements live on our own domain.
What actually breaks
The production plan is a spreadsheet the planner rebuilds every Monday, and the actuals are on paper on the shop floor, keyed in later if at all. A machine stopping mid-shift is recorded as a line in a logbook, so downtime is only visible at the monthly review, by which point the cause has been forgotten. Scrap is an estimate. Cost per unit is standard cost plus a guess.
How we build it
The bill of materials and routing come first, because everything else derives from them. A BOM is versioned with effective dates, since a component change next month must not rewrite the cost of a batch produced last month. Work orders are exploded into operations routed across work centres, and each operation records start, stop, quantity good and quantity scrapped, captured at the machine rather than transcribed later. Downtime is booked against a reason code at the moment it happens, which is the only way that data stays honest.
What goes wrong on these projects
Shop-floor data capture is where these projects live or die. If booking an operation interrupts the work, it gets done in a batch at the end of the shift and the timestamps become fiction, so terminals, scanners and screen design matter as much as the ERP. Second, the documented BOM and what the line actually consumes often differ. Third, machine integration is only as good as what the machine exposes.
What changes after
Plan and actual sit in the same system, so schedule adherence is visible during the week rather than after it. Downtime is attributed to a reason while the reason is still known. Cost per batch and per unit accumulates from booked material, labour and machine time.
Before you ask
Can you connect to machines?
Where machines expose data, yes. Foxquart connects manufacturing ERP to shop-floor equipment over OPC-UA, Modbus or vendor APIs, so downtime and output are captured as they happen rather than reconstructed later. Where a machine exposes nothing, operators record the same events on the floor and the data model stays consistent.
Discrete or process manufacturing?
Both. Foxquart designs the data model around your production type instead of forcing discrete assembly logic onto a batch process or the reverse. That choice drives how BOM, routing, work orders and costing behave, which is why it is settled in discovery rather than discovered halfway through the build.
How do operators record work on the shop floor?
At the point of production. Foxquart manufacturing ERP captures work-order execution, machine downtime and quality checks on the floor as they happen, so live shop-floor status replaces production plans in spreadsheets and actuals on paper. Nothing waits for someone to type up the shift's paperwork afterwards.
How do you calculate true cost per unit?
From recorded consumption, not estimation. Foxquart manufacturing ERP ties BOM, routing and work-order execution to the material and time actually recorded on the floor, producing real cost per batch and per unit. Most manufacturers price against an estimate, which is how a product gets sold at a loss unnoticed.
Does it track quality and non-conformance?
Yes. Foxquart manufacturing ERP records quality checks at defined points in routing and tracks non-conformances against the batch and work order that produced them. Because costing uses the same records, the cost of rework and scrap becomes visible per batch instead of disappearing into a monthly variance figure.
What does a manufacturing ERP actually change day to day?
Visibility, mainly. Foxquart manufacturing ERP replaces spreadsheet plans and paper actuals with live shop-floor status, downtime capture and actual batch costing. Shop-floor ERP work of this kind is scoped around roughly 18% higher line utilisation, which comes from seeing downtime while it is happening rather than at month-end.
