Core industry software: order and production control

Fragmented spreadsheets and scattered lists

Sales, work preparation and production relied on separate files and message threads. On-time delivery and post-calculation suffered from media breaks; capacity planning was only approximate.

Sales leads, work prep and shop supervisors exchanged versions by email. Every deviation between quote and manufacturing order had to be resolved manually—with delays on delivery promises.

We did not want another tool—we wanted one shared truth between office and shop floor.

Auditability and traceability

The customer needed traceable status transitions, clear roles and exports for recalculation—without auditors getting lost in technical click paths.

Quality assurance required approvals and histories that could not hide in scattered folders.

Target state: end-to-end order chain without media breaks

Business and executive teams agreed on an integrated system from quotation through production feedback, with every status change logged in an audit-safe way.

Capacity bottlenecks should surface early; post-calculations had to run without export marathons. The goal was a single source of truth for office, shop and management.

Production leads expected shop-floor feedback without retyping paper slips; IT wanted maintainable interfaces instead of CAD or quality silos.

Audit required every stage of the order chain to be documented with acceptance records and traceable change history.

Domain model and phased go-live

We refined the business object model with key users and shipped modules in short releases: first quotation and order, then scheduling, finally executive KPIs.

Delivery followed our custom software development practice—workshops on business objects and controlled cut-over dates. Further reading in the software development blog category.

Phase 1: quotation and order in production

The first release took quote, order confirmation and work-prep release live. Automated tests cover booking rules for tier pricing and special line items.

Existing master data migrated incrementally; parallel operation reduced risk for open orders.

Phase 2: shop floor, KPIs and technical base

Scheduling, shop-floor feedback and delivery KPIs followed in short iterations. The app runs containerised with versioned DB migrations and tests on critical booking paths.

CAD-adjacent interfaces ship as stable REST endpoints with version headers; OpenAPI docs ease follow-on integrations.

Key users validated each phase against defined acceptance criteria; staging environments mirror production parameters for load and booking tests before cut-over.

Dispatch means reading numbers from the system—not assembling three spreadsheets.

Operational clarity

Dispatch decisions draw on one shared data source; back-and-forth between office and shop floor dropped noticeably. Enhancements are budgeted within the existing release cadence.

On-time delivery is read weekly from the system instead of stitched from estimates.

Shop supervisors and work prep access the same order status; media breaks between office and shop floor disappeared from daily work.

Measurable effects after go-live

Internal metrics show fewer manual correction runs on order handover and faster post-calculations after project close.

Capacity bottlenecks surface earlier because work prep and production share the same actual data for scheduling.

Average post-calculation time dropped because actual costs are booked centrally instead of copied from side systems.

Quality assurance uses audit-safe approvals instead of folders with email attachments for audit evidence.

Development and support were delivered by Groenewold IT Solutions in Leer (East Frisia)—Made in Germany with close alignment to domain and quality teams.