How a factory moved from WhatsApp, paper and Excel to a single panel

Company

Naturforcer — maker of car mats and pool mats

Service

Custom software: admin panel

Scope

Orders, production, moulds and stock, shelf management, customer and supplier accounts, cheques and promissory notes, raw materials, income and expenses, sales team reports

In use

Every day by the factory team, for 3 months

Access

Computer and phone

At Naturforcer, orders came in over WhatsApp and were then typed one by one into an off-the-shelf accounting program. Mould tracking was done in Excel, and staff were given page after page of printouts to have an up-to-date list.

The real problem was that the off-the-shelf program did not understand how the factory produces. At the factory, a single mould is used to make 3–4 similar but different products. Accurate stock tracking meant that production from one mould had to be recorded against every matching product, and that a sale had to reduce stock across those products together. The program could not model this link, so the stock figures could not be trusted.

On top of this, finding which shelf a mould or stock item was on took time, and cheques, promissory notes and production records were hard to follow inside a general-purpose program.

We built the panel while working at the factory, knowing its processes up close. Because we knew the workflow from the inside, we did not try to fit it into the mould of an off-the-shelf program; we designed the software around the factory's real workflow. We put the everyday essentials first: orders, production, moulds, stock and accounts.

Production and stock

• Mould–product link: Production from a mould is recorded against every product that fits it; when a sale is made, stock is reduced correctly across those products.
• Shelf management: The panel shows which shelf every mould and stock item is on.
• Raw materials: Raw material deliveries and the amount used in production are tracked in kilograms.
• Daily, monthly and yearly production reports.

Orders and sales

• Orders from online sales channels arrive in the panel directly; orders that come in over WhatsApp are entered on the same screen.
• Daily, monthly and yearly sales for each sales representative, and which representative each customer belongs to.

Finance

• Customer and supplier accounts.
• Cheque and promissory note tracking set up the way the factory works.
• Income and expense records, and a cost calculation that uses them to work out a product's selling price.

The factory team has used the panel every day for three months. The factory's core operations now run in a single system.

The following improvements are planned; they are not in use yet.

• Creating WhatsApp orders in the panel automatically (the groundwork is in place).
• Issuing invoices, so that every task can be done from the one panel.
• Connecting bank accounts to the panel.