Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
1–10 of 161 posts
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#2As a UX person, this is the type of stuff I love to see posted here. So many people don't understand how atrocious the UX is in non-sexy career tracks such as manufacturing. One question I have is how users have reacted to your leftmost nav bar. 13 icons is a lot, do you show them all at one time, or do they dynamically appear based on the user role of the person who's logged in at the time?
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#3What vertical ERPs does it replace?
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#4First off, congrats, this is no small feat, well done.
A question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here?
And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (including my own!), and that is that software designed for one single hoster is often more complex to deploy and built in a different way, whereas software designed primarily to self-host looks much simpler. As an example, installing Wordpress or Odoo is relatively simple, with basic frontend webserver config and easy to run open source databases. Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy. What's the strategy here? Despite having the skills for it, I'm not sure I'd ever consider self-hosting Carbon, and maybe that's good for Carbon as a business, but it's also less good for the ecosystem.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#5We built a lot of the custom ERP related systems outside of our ERP. Leaving the financials to the big boys and just talk to the ERP. It's working really well.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#6We built a lot of the custom ERP related systems outside of our ERP. Leaving the financials to the big boys and just talk to the ERP. It's working really well.
We recently replaced Oracle financials for two of our customers-mid size manufacturers doing around $10B/yr in revs. We’re pretty small so grateful they trust us with that level of work.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#7First off, congrats, this is no small feat, well done. A question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here? And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (in…
> Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy
Perhaps this could be addressed by providing a Pulumi or Terraform program?
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#8Congrats on the launch! Love seeing modern manufacturing systems.
Do you handle supplier master data management? We're seeing procurement teams struggle with duplicate vendors in their ERPs - same supplier gets entered 5 different ways, messes up spend analytics and supplier relationships.
We're building AI agents for business data cleanup (still in stealth, docs coming). Manufacturing/supply chain customers seem to have the messiest supplier data - way worse than other industries.
Curious if this is something you're thinking about for Carbon? (CTO here, happy to chat)
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#9Do you have any users yet? What’s your target size manufacturing company? I’ve been in the industrial software space for a while, and at least for large MFG, you only see the major players, with SAP being the most common. There is this “UNS” concept that’s been around for 5ish years now and has caught steam (unified namespace, google and you’ll find it). It has holes from a technical standpoint, but it will get attention if you can show how it works with factory data in a UNS. Happy to help if i can. I work at a company that does industrial dataops now, focused on getting shop floor data in/out of the factory with context.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#10Do you have any users yet? What’s your target size manufacturing company? I’ve been in the industrial software space for a while, and at least for large MFG, you only see the major players, with SAP being the most common. There is this “UNS” concept that’s been around for 5ish years now and has caught steam (unified namespace, google and you’ll find it). It has holes from a technical standpoint, but it will get atten…
Hey I'd love to learn more about your thoughts. We have a discord if you'd like to join.
I see the market like this: - small job shops and startups are using it now (we have 5 customers today using it to run operations) - mid-market manufacturers with 200-ish employees are where i'd like to go, but many want all the accounting baked in and that's still a WIP - large players have to use SAP for accounting because they have multiple-ledgers, but i see this as a good "custom MES starting point"