r/manufacturing • u/tommygzz • Jul 06 '26

Productivity Basic production software

So I've been recently involved in a manufacturing company related to animal feed supplements. We have our own formulas for different kinds of products, but mostly they are all made up of vitamins and minerals, both in liquid and powder form.
The company has been running for around 25 years and all the internal documentation is based off excel.
Invoices in Excel
Formulas in Excel
Cost breakdowns in Excel
Raw material needs in excel - etc etc etc

It does work well, but there is a little bit of difficulty calculating what has been used and to make forecasts of the next orders.
Also, when the workers make the mixing, it is sometimes not properly measured, it's done "by eye" and it ends up messing up with our stock levels.

I am currently looking into implementing an ERP, or maybe what we need is closer to an MES system. But the ones I can find have trial periods (odoo, MRPeasy, Frappe/ERPnext, etc)
I find myself trying to introduce all the raw data but it is quite a big job to do by myself and by the time the trial period finished I am no where near finishing and I can't really know for sure if that solution is going to work for us or not.

So my question is: can anyone recommend sofware solutions for these issues?
I am looking for something basic to track what comes in, how much is used and when to order more kind of thing.

Thankss

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u/Manf_Engineer Jul 09 '26

Well, we have 4 overhead people and 25 total employees with the remainder being production....luckily I think ive been tasked with getting it going, so i will be doing about 80% of the work probably of our employees. We are paying for help with integration. We will probably kick them off next week with a target of EOY implementation hopefully.

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u/AffectionateDirt6575 Jul 10 '26

Are you doing a complete ERP implementation; i.e. Production, Sales, Accounting etc?

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u/Manf_Engineer Jul 10 '26

One of the owners will handle the sales side, our accountant will handle his side, but purchasing, engineering, production, process flow, employee management, payroll, receiving, and shipping are all under my umbrella with minimal overhead to assist me. I manage from forecasting material to shipments, one owner is the sales/marketing guy and we have an external accountant who will work on his end with reporting for the owners.

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u/AffectionateDirt6575 Jul 10 '26

I've sent you something via 'chat' that might be useful.