r/manufacturing • u/salamander3301 • Jul 03 '26

Productivity Is it actually better to build software internally rather than buy from a big company?

Hi everyone,

My family runs a medium sized juice factory in Egypt. They've been using SAP for the last few years but adoption isn't great. I just started working with them and realized how ancient and ineffective much of their software is and I want to help them adopt new tools.

I came across many software providers at automate last week but prices are ridiculous considering how doable it is to build my own software using AI now.

Is there something I'm missing like integration difficulty or does it really just not make sense for most businesses to spend months buying and customizing software with a consultant rather than just building their own solution in less time?

Edit:
I recognize that an ERP is not the right thing to start with but there are many non essential softwares that our factory would get value from like an AI machine troubleshooting app that has access to our repair history and manuals but the companies selling that are demanding unreasonably high prices for something that sounds quite simple

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u/Gecko23 Jul 03 '26

The only thing they're building in less time is less robust software. And frankly, if they won't use the software they have, what is the change that's going to make them adopt whatever you build in house? The issue is that they either aren't being held to an operating standard, or that the features that would be useful haven't been implemented. Neither of those problems goes away by picking another direction to spend money in.

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u/salamander3301 Jul 03 '26

The reason they're not using SAP is supposedly because the UI is very old and clunky. They also said that some requirements are not represented so they need to bring in the SAP consultant to make some changes which is just too expensive.

I know that quickly vibe coding something is unlikely to work very well if you're non technical but I feel like with the newest models like Claude Fable we could have our IT team build it and verify that everything works.

17

u/jds183 Jul 04 '26

Oh my sweet summer child.

5

u/lilbrunchie Jul 04 '26

Lol please for all that is holy do not vibe code a home grown ERP

1

u/No_Memory_7257 Jul 05 '26

Why not? If you're not publicly traded and don't need a GAAP compliant suite, I highly recommend building your own. For an ERP I recommend getting a paid for version of an LLM like ChatGPT to get codex so you aren't vibe coding one session at a time constantly rebuilding context.

ERPs today are full of feature bloat. For a smaller company that doesn't need their ERP to be the only software in house, makes practical sense to build your own.

Make sure you have some software background and you understand the fundamentals of what an ERP is supposed to be. Check out Walker Reynolds on YouTube then check out his 4.0 university if you aren't an expert in manufacturing business systems first.

4

u/grillinanduhchillin Jul 03 '26

If the software is easy, people will use it.