Illustrative exampleManufacturing / Metal Manufacturing

Twenty-six years of job routings, moved off a server nobody could replace

A metal job shop ran on a late-nineties ERP that lived in a beige tower under a desk. We rebuilt it as a web app that quotes exactly the way the old one did.

This shows the kind of work we do. It is not a client engagement, and the business in it is invented.

Where it started

The problem

The ERP was written in a language perhaps two people in the state could still read, and one of them had retired. It ran on a beige tower under a desk in the front office.

It held everything. Quotes, nine thousand part routings, machine hours, the lot. When the tower's power supply failed one January, the floor ran on printouts for four days.

Off-the-shelf replacements wanted the shop to change how it quoted. The owner didn't want to, and once we'd seen how they quote, neither did we.

What changed

What we did

We reverse-engineered the data files before writing a line of new code, then checked every exported table against reports the old system printed itself.

The replacement is a web app on PostgreSQL that keeps the old quoting logic, including the setup-time rules the estimator had been tuning for twenty years. The screens look different. The numbers don't.

For six weeks both systems ran side by side. Every quote went through both, and any mismatch became a ticket. There were sixty-three, mostly rounding.

The beige tower is unplugged and kept on a shelf, at the owner's request. Nobody has switched it on since.

Built with

  • PostgreSQL
  • Python
  • Django
  • HTMX
  • Ubuntu Server

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