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Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

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Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#21
I’m the owner of a smallish furniture manufacturer. About 15 employees. I built out the order management system myself because nothing really fit our process.

After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#22
post #5

We 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.

Does the ERP allow you API access, or do you need to do CSV upload/download?

we give people access to the same supabase API as us, but it's scoped to their company with RLS. the docs are autogenerated: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1873043714454811100

you can use the API from inside the codebase, or outside of it: https://github.com/crbnos/carbon?tab=readme-ov-file#api

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#23
post #8

Congrats 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…

for the supplier problem, we just use a typeahead/combobox component. but for raw materials, we auto-generate the ids like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1947682873416221184 also working on some agents: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586 would love to talk, i'm brad@carbon.ms

Nice! Yeah, a typeahead works to a degree. I imagine that's searching their own instance vs calling out to a standardized DB you manage?

Raw materials is definitely a different animal, so auto-generating definitely works. I know a company where that's all they do - they manually pour over supplier specs to get all the model names.

Agent approach looks super cool. I see the supplier search piece happening there.

We've mapped out ~265M+ businesses globally. We're thinking about this as a data infra angle where products can tap into our system to access all the world's businesses. We're getting requests for processing millions of ERP records to clean/standardize, plus semantic supplier search across our full dataset.

I'll shoot you an email to chat more.

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#24

I’m the owner of a smallish furniture manufacturer. About 15 employees. I built out the order management system myself because nothing really fit our process. After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.

yeah, good point. the docs could definitely use some work. check this out if you're interested. it's not complete, but it goes through the software pretty well: https://learn.carbon.ms

i don't know if you build anything custom, but we do have a configurator

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for the supplier problem, we just use a typeahead/combobox component. but for raw materials, we auto-generate the ids like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1947682873416221184 also working on some agents: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586 would love to talk, i'm brad@carbon.ms

Nice! Yeah, a typeahead works to a degree. I imagine that's searching their own instance vs calling out to a standardized DB you manage? Raw materials is definitely a different animal, so auto-generating definitely works. I know a company where that's all they do - they manually pour over supplier specs to get all the model names. Agent approach looks super cool. I see the supplier search piece happening there. We've…

thanks! look forward to talking to you

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#26
post #2

As 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?

man! i wish i knew how to do a better job with that. there's just so much stuff. do you have any ideas?

Give users an AI assistant they can ask to navigate them to the right screen or section of the application?

In a previous job, we built our AI assistant so that it could operate our UI in the front-end and it was very powerful.

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

man! i wish i knew how to do a better job with that. there's just so much stuff. do you have any ideas?

Give users an AI assistant they can ask to navigate them to the right screen or section of the application? In a previous job, we built our AI assistant so that it could operate our UI in the front-end and it was very powerful.

like a cmd+k type deal or something different? we do have cmd+k navigation to everywhere currently + global search, but i worry that less sophisticated users might not use it.

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#28

The modular ERP/MES/QMS approach is interesting and challenges traditional manufacturing processes. Most manufacturers obsess over single source of truth. (I.e. ensuring a part number means exactly the same thing across planning, production, and quality systems.) On the one hand, breaking these into separate apps creates potential data consistency risks. On the other hand, it could enable much better adoption. Start…

hey founder here. they are separate apps, but use the same database, and same api. i'm also a big believer in single-source-of-truth and the compound startup idea

Ah gotcha. Makes sense to get the benefits of modular adoption without the headaches. Nice approach.

Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

#29
post #8

Congrats 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…

this is a big issue in healthcare, a chunk of my last company's revenue was doing MDM for large medtechs.

Interesting. Was that a MDM focused product for healthcare or something more general infra wise like Informatica?

I don't have much context in the healthcare space and the challenges that exist there. We've been mainly talking to people in fintech, supply chain, and sales & marketing, which is primarily where I ran into this at past roles.

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