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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

#91

Post by ssss11 »

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?

They do lots of things that’s the problem… The key items in my experience are: 1. Finance/accounting processes 2. Supply chain processes (for product companies) 3. Project/Services processes (for consulting companies) 4. Procurement They can have other things like: sales, customer service, order management, payroll, HR, projects, warehouse or factory management, materials management and so on. A key decision in very large companies is whether to go with one ERP that does most things and they having to integrate the rest (tedious, expensive), or many smaller apps that might be best in class for their niche then having to integrate them (also tedious, expensive)

And ERP is Enterprise resource planning.

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

#92

Post by jacquesm »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #87

While we're on the topic of ERP: I have noticed that, in 2025, many small businesses still use Excel. Is there an underserved market? Or simply a "tarpit idea" (deceptively attractive but actually unscalable, time-consuming) I asked 5 friends who are business owners and 5 who are working for SMEs. None of them use "apps". The best they use is accounting app.

Many large businesses still use Excel! You'd be surprised how much commerce is enabled by spreadsheets.

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

#93

Post by jacquesm »

stephen_g wrote: post #49
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?

Basically the core functionality is to track inventory, manage purchase orders in, and sales orders out. Generally that's also linked to accounting so basically as you buy and sell stuff everything is linked to your accounting ledgers. Then there's MRP (M for manufacturing) which is usually an option - for when stuff that you're selling isn't the same as what you're buying. So the ERP/MRP manages bills of materials f…

Not all materials are parts. For instance, if you run a soup factory you don't order 'soup parts' but bulk ingredients in the same proportions that you end up selling, but there are many other things that you need to worry about in the process of preparation and there are things that don't even make it into the end product at all that you still need during the manufacturing step (for instance, cleaning products, various chemicals). So 'basically parts lists' is a bit of a shortcut.

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

#94

Post by jacquesm »

Impressive. Some questions:

- Who is 'I'?

- How do you see continuity if something were to happen to you?

- How does it stack up against ERPNext?

- Why did you decide to build an ERP system from the ground up?

- What is the deployment situation?

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

#95

Post by delusional »

whstl wrote: post #73
RossBencina wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Hey! I was just on the receiving end of that. Twice! Its still the same.

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

#96

Post by rancar2 »

barbinbrad wrote: post #57
rancar2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR Brad: I’d suggest you look at any customers with potential scale, who should have a custom SKU/BOM/order mix. 3D printing and full custom made to order products will have this mix, and it gets increasing painful when scaling past 100s of orders per month. One will find there will be in-house systems and workaround to deal with this complication, which should be fixed decently once a company is in the 1000s of or…

really well said, imo! it's interesting how there's two views of ERP. one is a G/L + anything needed to support it. and the other is more of a tool that supports operations and planning. i started with a G/L, but have kept it hidden even now, because my thought it that everything else should be good first, and support the G/L second.

Operations and planning are performed when one’s company fits the mold of a classic business. The system you are building suits the companies that break the mold, which is a growing number as personalization/hyper customization grows.

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

#97

Post by detourdog »

ssss11 wrote: post #91
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?

They do lots of things that’s the problem… The key items in my experience are: 1. Finance/accounting processes 2. Supply chain processes (for product companies) 3. Project/Services processes (for consulting companies) 4. Procurement They can have other things like: sales, customer service, order management, payroll, HR, projects, warehouse or factory management, materials management and so on. A key decision in very…

Thank you for expanding the acronym. I’m always surprised the acronyms aren’t expanded in projects website. This gives me the impression the developers are embedded in the status quo of the problem domain.

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

#98

Post by delusional »

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…

> 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

There's an additional catch to that old argument as well. If you actually do what they say, and stick to all the templates. Well guess what, they're all going to change with next update as well and now you need to change all your business processes at the same cadence as they happen to update their software. You still have to adapt to the changes of the system, it's just not the IT departments problem.

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

#99

Post by xorcist »

danpalmer wrote: post #62
plumeria wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's not just about the initial deployment, although these may help. If you're running Wordpress, the question "why is it slow" is pretty limited in scope – you need a faster webserver, database, or maybe need those two to be closer to each other. A simplification but not much of one. For this, is it the app server, the task queue, or one of several other components, or is it in the Supabase layer, or is it a depende…

There's also the issue of having a dozen moving parts form the system, each developed for their own reasons. So you could find that upgrading one product changes something, say collation for utf-16, which might be entirely reasonable taken in isolation but that the rest of the system is unprepared for.

It is up to you to fend off dozens of small things. Over time that accumulates. It's like python programmers using two dozen pypi dependencies because they've heard nih is bad. Or think nodejs if that's your thing. What you do in practice is you freeze everything in place and then you postpone it all for an increasingly indefinite future. Organizations then periodically need to freeze work for weeks or even months at a time just to keep up with dependencies. This is clearly a lot of work.

Terraform, or even better Ansible, is a good choice to document make those changes over time in a standardized way. But it doesn't make the work go away. The work is there and still has to be done. Those tools also clearly suffers from the same many-moving-parts problem, as soon as you include external modules with their dependencies too, so you have take care not to magnify the problem by accident instead.

This is what system admins and integrators do all day. They will tell you in unison that the best integration is the one that doesn't exist.

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

#100

Post by benchly »

jacquesm wrote: post #94

Impressive. Some questions: - Who is 'I'? - How do you see continuity if something were to happen to you? - How does it stack up against ERPNext? - Why did you decide to build an ERP system from the ground up? - What is the deployment situation?

Good questions. I'd like to add some, if you don't mind.

How does it stack up against Sage?

Expanding on "what is the deployment situation," how long should it be expected to take for full conversion to the Carbon platform from the described situation of discordant software that has been entrenched in a particular business's practice for decades?

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