Custom software development — a product team, shipped as a service — for Manufacturing

Manufacturing in DACH and Europe more broadly is dominated by mid-market specialists — the Hidden Champions, the Mittelstand machine builders, the contract manufacturers, the Tier-1 and Tier-2 automotive suppliers. These businesses are extraordinarily good at their physical product and consistently undersupplied on software. ERPs are old (SAP ECC, Navision, ProAlpha), MES systems are partial or absent, customer-facing tooling barely exists, and CRMs are spreadsheets in 60% of cases. The decision-makers are pragmatic and ROI-driven — a manufacturer will sign for a piece of software the day they can see what it will save on the shop floor, and not before. Long-term partnerships matter; vendor-hopping is rare.

• ▸Internal CRMs, order portals, and shop-floor dashboards are where the ROI lives — not the customer-facing site.
• ▸Build for offline-tolerance — many shop floors have flaky WiFi and operators on tablets, not desktops.
• ▸Avoid ripping out the ERP — wrap it. The ERP stays the system of record; everything modern sits on top.
• ▸Multi-language and multi-currency are non-optional — most DACH manufacturers sell across 8–15 countries.
• ▸Roles and permissions are gnarly — separate dealer, internal sales, production, finance, executive views, each with their own data slice.
• ▸Build for the next 5 years, not for the next 5 weeks — manufacturers expect software to live a decade, the design must support it.

A specialty-chemicals manufacturer commissioned a custom internal CRM from us, replacing a 12-year-old Access database. Daily order-entry time dropped from 95 minutes per rep to 22; cross-border orders unlocked 1.3M EUR of previously unbooked sales in year one.