Manufacturing: the money goes where nobody measures

“I know how much raw material I bought and how much product I sold. What I do not know is where the difference went.”

Food, wood and furniture, metal, light industry. In manufacturing the most expensive mistake is not the wrong decision — it is having no data to decide on: the recipe lives in the supervisor's head, the unit cost surfaces at year end, and nobody measures scrap.

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This is what usually hurts in manufacturing

These are not theoretical problems. At a manufacturer of 10 to 80 people, every one of them is measurable in money.

There is no single valid material norm. Exactly how much of which material goes into a product — called a recipe in food, a material norm or a parts list in metal and furniture — lives in a spreadsheet, on a printed sheet and in the supervisor's head, in three slightly different versions. When he is on holiday, production slows down.
Unit cost cannot be broken down by product. You can see how much material went in total, but not which product the company earned on and which one it lost on. Pricing then becomes a hunch.
The machine is idle because the material has not arrived. Purchasing starts when somebody notices the shortage, not when the order book and the supplier lead time say it should.
Scrap and rework are not recorded. What is not measured cannot be reduced, and it is missing from the margin calculation too.
A complaint cannot be traced back to a batch. A customer brings back a faulty product and there is no way to tell which raw-material delivery it came from — so there is no way to know what else needs recalling.

What the system does about it

We do not roll out modules; we close the questions above. Each heading below is the name of a feature as the system calls it, and underneath it is what that feature solves in practice.

Bill of materials: What turns into what, in what ratio, with what loss. In one place, versioned, so last year's recipe and this year's do not get mixed up.
Routing: Which machine, which sequence of operations, how long. This is what capacity planning and a realistic delivery date are built from.
Work orders and material issue: Exactly as much leaves the warehouse as the order justifies, and you can see what stayed behind.
Material requirements planning: The system tells you what to order and when, from open orders, stock on hand and supplier lead times.
Contract and subcontracted manufacturing: The material sent out and the semi-finished goods coming back do not vanish from the records.
Quality control, batch and expiry tracking: At goods-in and at finished-goods reporting alike. A batch can be traced from receipt to dispatch.
Product-level cost and margin: Material, labour and machine time together. This is what reveals which product actually earns.

The path of one raw material, from receipt to traceability

This is what the same process looks like when every station writes into the same database.

1
Receipt The raw material gets a batch number. The delivery note and the supplier details are tied to that batch.
2
Quality inspection A check recorded at goods-in. What fails does not go into production.
3
Put-away The batch goes to a bin, and stock updates immediately rather than at the end of the week.
4
Work order From the bill of materials, the system says how much is needed and what is missing.
5
Material issue and processing The quantity issued is booked against the order. So is the scrap.
6
Finished-goods reporting The finished product gets its own batch number, and you can tell which raw-material batches it was made from.
7
Cost Material, labour hours and machine time add up to one figure, per product and per order.
8
Traceability When a complaint comes in, it takes minutes to see which delivery is affected and where it went.

This is the level we built at BURA across eight stations for an industrial group, on 22 sites. At a small or mid-sized manufacturer the same thing works at a considerably smaller scope.

Package, price, timing

Start +

Manufacturing

from 18,000 euros

Manufacturing is the most complex area, because it moves every other module: stock, purchasing, quality and finance. That is why it costs more, and why it is worth rolling out in phases.

Monthly operating fee: after the audit.

The first end-to-end process typically goes live in four to six weeks, after which the system is built out module by module. The exact figure and the schedule come out of the process audit, in writing, with a defined scope.

We describe how the rollout runs on the main page.

Let us talk about your processes

Tell us what you make and where the process gets stuck. The audit will show which step is worth putting live first, and what it costs.

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We reply by email within one working day.
contact@exar.ro · 0740 507 135