Metal-fabrication shop

A Polish metal-fabrication shop growing 15–20% a year — cutting, turning, milling, sheet-metal burning, welding and assemblies, roughly 1,500 production items and 800–900 orders a year across two to three halls and ~10 workstations. Their processes had gone corporate; their tools hadn't.

Production lived in an off-the-shelf tool that had stopped adding the features they needed. Accounting sat in a Windows desktop app with no API. Product data and complaints lived in Excel, and one key customer's orders were tracked in a paper binder someone leafed through every week to see what shipped next. The warehouse wasn't connected to production, a welded assembly built from three separately-made parts was invisible to the system as an assembly — and the daily pain was rescheduling: pull one part forward and the whole plan had to be redone by hand.

They'd been burned once by a failed ERP — "80% off the shelf, 20% to finish" that never landed — so we led with proof, not promises. We built a working prototype of the whole flow first — RFQ → quote → order → nested BOM → planning → shop floor → QC → warehouse — as a clickable demo, and turned the mockups into a contractual annex. We're now building the real system on Open Mercato, with accounting left where it belongs: integrated to their new Subiekt over its API rather than rebuilt.

Tech wrap-up

• Prototype-first — the full RFQ-to-invoice flow as a clickable demo before a line of production code, so scope is agreed up front and the mockups become a contract annex
• Impact-aware rescheduling — pull one part forward and preview the cascade (operations, machine cells, downstream orders, at-risk deadlines, who to notify) before you accept it. The client's single biggest pain
• Production planning in a tile / Kanban / timeline view the crew already knows, auto-loaded by work-cell and operation times
• Nested, multi-level BOM — end products → semi-finished (each with its own routing) → purchased raw materials — with unit conversions (kg ↔ m² of sheet)
• RFQ & quoting with per-component costing (material + operations + cooperation + markup), approval before send, and one-click conversion to a splittable sales order
• Operator kiosk + time tracking, inline quality control with tolerance checks, and scrap/rework as linked repair jobs so cost stays visible
• Warehouse with min-stock alerts and material heat/certificate (3.1) traceability — from goods-in to issue on the shop floor
• Accounting stays in Subiekt Nexo via its API; hostable in the cloud or on the client's own server
• Built on Open Mercato — MIT-licensed, owned by the client, no per-seat licenses

Screenshots below come from the interactive prototype (demo data, client details anonymized).