Production and warehouse hooked up to the program the company already has

The company started out in trade. A sales and inventory program handles invoices, orders and stock levels - and for years it was enough. Then production came along: first simple assemblies from purchased parts, today dozens of products with their own bills of materials. The program stayed the same, because sales and the warehouse run smoothly in it. Production lives alongside: recipes in a spreadsheet, work orders in messages and printouts, material consumption entered after the fact.

At the end of the month someone books the material issues in bulk, covering several orders at once. The quantities are copied from paper notes, partly from memory. The booked consumption differs from what the shop floor actually used, so the warehouse value starts to drift away from what sits on the shelves. The quote for the next order is calculated on numbers nobody fully trusts.

Where the existing program stops being enough

The sales and inventory program does its job: it keeps stock levels, documents and settlements in order. Production, however, asks different questions. What is in progress right now? How much material will leave the warehouse when this order starts? Which operation is putting the deadline at risk? The program does not answer these directly, so the answers live in spreadsheets and in the heads of a few people.

This setup is common across markets. In Poland, only 42.8% of manufacturing companies with 10 or more employees have an ERP system (software covering the whole business, from warehouse to accounting), according to a survey by Statistics Poland published in December 2025 - the rest run production next to a sales or accounting program. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland ERP is the standard, and yet in the Staufen study conducted in late 2023 among 417 industrial companies, 54% named Excel lists as a place where their data lives, even though 77% have an ERP system.

Why an add-on “for everyone” tends to be too generic

The first thought is usually to buy a ready-made production add-on for the current program. Sometimes that is enough. A module written for every industry at once has to simplify, though: a sewing workshop settles material by recipe per model and size, a machining shop by actual consumption with allowances, an equipment manufacturer picks subassemblies for a specific order. Companies that have tried it often hear the same line: it can be done, but you have to change the way you work to fit the program. A few months later production is back in the spreadsheet.

The second thought is replacing everything with a large ERP system. That is a project stretching over many months, and it also touches the areas that work well today: sales, warehouse, accounting. The cost and risk of such a change often outweigh the problem it was meant to solve.

The solution in three elements

There is a third way: the existing program stays, and next to it a production layer is built to fit the company's process. It consists of three elements.

First, the work order with a bill of materials. The production layer keeps orders, recipes and operations, while reading item records and stock levels directly from the existing program. One item register, no double entry: when sales creates a new item, production sees it immediately.

Second, recording where the work happens. Material consumption is registered at the workstation, at the moment of picking, and the product status is changed with a scanner - the operator scans the order code at the start and at the end of each operation. Nobody retypes anything after hours, and the “in progress” state is visible as it happens.

Third, the documents come back on their own. From the recorded events, the mechanism creates the warehouse documents - material issues for consumed materials and receipts for finished goods - and passes them to the existing program with the correct quantity and value. Warehouse, sales and accounting keep working in the same program as before, only on data that matches the shop floor.

What this means for the business owner

The calculation is worth doing on your own numbers. How many hours a week does someone in the office spend writing up, retyping and correcting production documents? How many times in the last quarter did the stock in the program differ from the stock on the shelf, and how long did it take to explain the difference? How much more reliable would a quote be if material costs came from actual consumption and deadlines from the real load on workstations?

On the other side of the calculation stands a change smaller than it seems: the current program stays, sales and accounting work as before, and the new activities on the shop floor come down to a scan and a confirmation of picking.

Where to start

With a small scope that can be verified in a few weeks: one product, one bill of materials, one workstation with a scanner. During that time, the consumption and statuses recorded at the workstation are compared with the existing routine. Once document values stop needing corrections, the scope grows to further products and workstations. The starting point is always the process the company already has - together with the program that runs it.

How manufacturing companies in Poland and in Germany, Austria and Switzerland describe this problem in their own words is what I show in the report “Excel, paper notes and the one person who knows” - you can download it there as well.

If this description sounds like your company, write to me or book a meeting - we will walk through your process and check what can be hooked up to the program you already have.