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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

#71

Post by 414techie »

barbinbrad wrote: post #55
calvinmorrison wrote: post #42

I'll bite. I am a ERP consultant in the SMB manufacturing and distribution space. Primarily we operate on Acumatica, Sage and Netsuite. The most important thing about ERP systems is - customization. IE: Scripting (netsuite), or even core programming (Sage100 for example). Not just user defined fields but workflows and being able to override and hook into core parts of the system. Say you want to override your cost ba…

these are all excellent questions! i think, interestingly, the answer to all of them is basically -- there's an off the shelf version that's opinionated and good. and if you want to take it a step further, you'd want to just modify the source code. i think open-source gives consultatnts and integrators super powers that they may not be used to -- everything currently has to be done through abstractions on abstraction…

I currently work in an ERP adjacent industry serving M&D. I don’t think this is as beneficial as you think it is.

Your value prop lands really well with the Software Architect in me. That part of my skill set loves the idea of creativity, flexibility, etc.

The Director in me does not want that. That sounds like a money pit, never done, management nightmare. What kind of dev do I hire? Do I need a Product Manager for that? How long will it take? Sounds too hard to get a win as a senior leader.

Most of the software in the adjacent space (and ERPs) have “prescriptions” or an ecosystem to get customizations done. Code may get deployed in a special assembly, a special SDK exists, etc

A prescriptive way to get the job done is much more preferred for predictability, even if it is not as loved by the developers.

I think Carbon is a neat and ambitious offering - happy to chat more with you if desired.

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

#72

Post by aitchnyu »

barbinbrad wrote: post #27
sixdimensional wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please share the feedback for keyboard shortcuts from real users. Now shops in India tend to use touchscreens or have staff fiddle with laptops with tiny touchpads, but lots of shops use ERPs (Tally) with 90s UI that dont need mouse.

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

#73

Post by whstl »

RossBencina wrote: post #58
on_the_train wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on a erp for a short while and I genuinely still don't know. The amount of bullshit surrounding them is certainly staggering. I now work on a large company that is about to introduce a large new erp system and is not only investing billions into that change with the mother of all vendor lock ins; but we're also internally transforming the company so that the erp will work. But no, we can't afford the two…

> internally transforming the company I'm not sure how things are now, but I once worked tangentially on a mid-sized corporation ERP rollout. At that time it was not unusual to have an entire department at the ERP-adopting company called "Change Management." Any company-wide process change was managed by the Change Management department.

Oh that brings memories! Been in quite a few of those.

Basically the ERP vendor sells you the software and estimates that you need a couple months and a couple consultants for the migration and integration, plus a few users of your product as guinea pigs. It is expensive as heck but well, at least it is only two months (plus hotels, plane and food).

After two months you’re halfway done according to the vendor but you need some extra helping hands for the harder features, so you get more consultants, and a department to handle change. You get a few posters.

After a couple years you have eight consultants and a consulting product manager still doing the migration work, plus eight more freelancing ERP experts, and about four engineers from your own team working full time on apis. The work is halfway done, though! Your non-tech staff is juggling between two products and dissenting voices start to appear. You make and distribute t-shirts with texts like “Project Evolution” or “Project Future” to ensure everyone is on board.

After two more years you are almost halfway there, but staff turnover guarantees that people don’t remember the productivity of yore, and the new ERP is judged as good enough. People have gotten used to it, the jokes aren’t as vicious as before, and only a handful of people were fired in the previous years due to the company going severely over budget. But hey nobody gets fired for buying IBM so the boss who decided to blow 15 million on it is fine.

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

#74

Post by PeterStuer »

on_the_train wrote: post #53
SilverElfin wrote: post #48

What exactly is an “ERP”? Virtually everything I read about them or on the website of products, is so vague and broad that it sounds like “it’s everything”. How would a business know they need this product? For the big ERPs out there, is there a clear guide with screenshots that show what they concretely do?

I've worked on a erp for a short while and I genuinely still don't know. The amount of bullshit surrounding them is certainly staggering. I now work on a large company that is about to introduce a large new erp system and is not only investing billions into that change with the mother of all vendor lock ins; but we're also internally transforming the company so that the erp will work. But no, we can't afford the two…

The major ERP vendors do not price based on product or services delivered, but they will just make a price based on your revenue.

The reasoning is that a company in a certain vertical with a certain size will spend x% of revenue on IT, and they want all of that.

ERP platforms are ridiculously hard to customise, and maintainance of customisations across version upgrades is even worse. So they will rightfully advise business operations adapt to the ERP template, rather than the other way around. They know full well in advance you will end up not following that advice as the changes would be enormous and lost functionality as compared to the previous system beyond tolerable from a business point of view, but they also know you will only discover the scale of this after the project has been committed.

Speaking about committing: they will leave no room, basically execution a denial of service to the whole of not just your IT departments but also all your business analyst interactions. Any non ERP transformation project will grind to an absolute halt.

Many of not most of these huge ERP migrations fail. The ERP vendor has been covering there ass from before the contract was even signed, and you will find their real expertise was building an airtight very well documented case showing you, not them, were at fault. These cases are nearly always settled and kept out of the press because neither party wants to lose face.

And you are right about the mother of all lockins if the project should succeed and actualy move into production (which they will try to force long before it is ready). They will leave you no room to ever go back. You'll have to commit even a lott more to leave than you needed to get in.

And as for all those business and IT people now trained on the ERP, wich is part of the project from day 1, good luck holding on to them. Their poaching will be not overtly but discreetly facilitated by the ERP's channel.

First day of first 'course' by the ERP vendor for the ERP transformation team, the opening sentence of the instructor litterally was: "I congratulate you all for being here. Next week after completing this course, walk into your manager's office and demand a 20% pay rise, as you are now worth that".

I myself have turned down very lucrative monetary offers, as the downside of working in those projects, whether at vendor or client side, is that the amount of unhappiness you create and are perpetually surounded by in those positions is just to mindnumbing that at least for me the money does not buy you out of that daily misery. But if you thrive on conflict, you can make some great money there.

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

#75

Post by thedogeye »

SilverElfin wrote: post #48

What exactly is an “ERP”? Virtually everything I read about them or on the website of products, is so vague and broad that it sounds like “it’s everything”. How would a business know they need this product? For the big ERPs out there, is there a clear guide with screenshots that show what they concretely do?

This blog post from Retool was really helpful for answering that question: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers

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

#76

Post by tonyhart7 »

progx wrote: post #70

Is this a kind of developer BINGO? ;-) "Techstack Remix – framework Typescript – language Tailwind – styling Radix UI - behavior Supabase - database Supabase – auth Upstash - cache Trigger - jobs Resend – email Novu – notifications Vercel – hosting Stripe - billing" And no joke: congrats to your product!

a new "MERN" stack of web development post covid era

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

#77

Post by mattmanser »

PeterStuer wrote: post #74
on_the_train wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on a erp for a short while and I genuinely still don't know. The amount of bullshit surrounding them is certainly staggering. I now work on a large company that is about to introduce a large new erp system and is not only investing billions into that change with the mother of all vendor lock ins; but we're also internally transforming the company so that the erp will work. But no, we can't afford the two…

The major ERP vendors do not price based on product or services delivered, but they will just make a price based on your revenue. The reasoning is that a company in a certain vertical with a certain size will spend x% of revenue on IT, and they want all of that. ERP platforms are ridiculously hard to customise, and maintainance of customisations across version upgrades is even worse. So they will rightfully advise bu…

I worked on an ERP system for construction/architect firms in the 00s. The company was about 15 people when I joined, 40 when I left.

We consistently delivered migrations, but we hand crafted SQL extraction scripts, with data cleaning, etc. You could fully customize it, branding it with your own logos/colours/custom css, etc. There was just a clause that the "powered by" link had to stay visible.

I can't remember a single failed migration, though we were split into three "teams" each covering a different set of customers, so might have not seen one.

I suppose we were fairly small scale, and maybe those were the days where some serious attention to detail and care of the customer were still possible as generally we were replacing paper based workflows, not trying to migrate existing electronic workflows with huge data volumes.

But it's perfectly possible to do (and we worked with some fairly big companies in the space).

One of the funniest, yet saddest, support calls I remember getting was being asked "What do we do with Sue now, we don't have anything for her to do anymore?".

So it entirely depends on your implementation team I think. It's possible to do it well. But you probably need a very good set of consultants. If your ERP trainer is coming in and immediately setting up conflict with your company, that's definitely not a good sign.

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

#78

Post by cess11 »

danpalmer wrote: post #4

First 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…

AGPL so I'd wager the idea is to sell this as a service while still allowing self-hosting, perhaps in the hope to gain bug reports, 'free' testing and some leads.

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

#79

Post by ketedrum »

barbinbrad wrote: post #11
jdhn wrote: 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?

if you're gonna keep the left icons-sidebar, its probably a good idea that you label the icons - i think its mentally exhausting for all users to remember what each icon stands for all the time, and also you may want to change the icons themselves in future.

i'd also suggest to inline the left sub-menu: so much space under the left sub menu ends up unused. better to inline it at the top of the page, and widen the main content area.

anyway congrats on what you've achieved so far; looks great and best of luck!

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