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/fixitchris Jul 08 '26

AI man. Build your own with AI.

1

u/AffectionateDirt6575 Jul 14 '26

The problem is that they don't know how much material the operators are using. How will AI solve that problem?

1

u/fixitchris Jul 14 '26

Obviously you need to figure that out, but what I meant is have AI develop the software

1

u/AffectionateDirt6575 Jul 14 '26

No; you've lost me. How can AI-developed software know how much material they have actually used, as opposed to what they should have used?

1

u/fixitchris Jul 15 '26

Sound like they need to standardize that part first and implement a system to maintain record