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Industry · Manufacturing

Manufacturing: score the ERP-shop-floor gap before inventory drifts again.

You picked the ERP a decade ago when the business was half the size, and it no longer fits the way you ship today. The shop floor runs on a clipboard and a spreadsheet one supervisor maintains, your MES does not talk to your ERP without a nightly export that breaks every other Friday, and your prime customer wants EDI by Q3.

The light-manufacturing concentration in Hampton Roads sits along the Route 58 corridor between Chesapeake and Suffolk and across the Chesapeake industrial parks. Most of these operators run $5M to $30M in revenue with 20 to 150 employees, and the IT pain is not a Norfolk port operator's pain. It is ERP that no longer fits, a shop floor whose data is trapped in spreadsheets, inventory accuracy below ninety percent, and a quality-and-compliance posture that has to hold up when a prime customer or an ISO auditor walks the floor.

The buyer is the operations leader who picked the stack a decade ago, knows every workaround the team built around it, and cannot tell whether the right move is a new ERP, an MES layer over the existing one, or a shop-floor capture tool that fixes the data without replacing anything. That decision sits unmade for years; the cost shows up in cycle counts and late shipments.

Welder working on a part on a light-manufacturing shop floor

Where it usually hurts

Key concerns in this sector.

  • ERP fit at the $5M-$30M band

    When the ERP stops matching the way you ship and what comes next. The roadmap names the platforms and the sequence.

  • Shop-floor data capture

    The clipboard and the one-supervisor spreadsheet, replaced with capture the floor will actually use. Adoption telemetry measures whether it held.

  • MES-to-ERP integration health

    The nightly export that breaks every other Friday. We map the dependency chain before the next outage forces it.

  • EDI obligations from prime customers

    When the prime wants EDI by Q3 and the person who handled integrations left last year. We scope the work and the sequencing.

  • Quality and compliance posture

    The documentation an ISO auditor or a prime's supplier-quality team asks to see, scored as part of the Controls pillar.

Services we apply here

How we engage in this sector.

You can have your score within a week.

The free call is free. You keep the written CTGA score and prioritized roadmap we send within a week. If we are not the right fit, you keep both and we both move on.

Let's Talk See the 30-day roadmap
Questions

Frequently asked questions about Helix Stax managed IT services

Usually when the way you ship today no longer matches the way you set the ERP up a decade ago: multi-entity complexity, EDI demands from a prime customer, or inventory accuracy drifting below ninety percent on cycle counts. The IT roadmap engagement names whether the fix is a new ERP, a WMS or MES layer over the existing one, or a shop-floor capture tool that solves the data problem without replacing anything.

Both. The shop floor is usually where the real data problem lives: a clipboard and a spreadsheet one supervisor maintains, feeding numbers into an ERP nobody trusts. Adoption telemetry covers scanner usage, transaction velocity, and error rates so you know whether the floor is using the tools or working around them.

A free 30-minute call about where your stack costs you time or money, then a seven-day IT audit naming the integrations that broke quietly, the seats nobody opens, and the order of operations for any modernization. We usually surface an auto-renew worth canceling in the first week.