When the spreadsheet stops working: what an engineer-to-order ERP must do
Engineer-to-order manufacturing does not have a product catalogue. Every heat exchanger, vessel or column is designed for one customer, costed once, built once and documented once. Most ERP systems assume the opposite, which is why so many fabricators run their real business in spreadsheets next to the ERP they paid for.
1. The estimate has to be weight- and alloy-based, and it has to have revisions
An ETO quote is built from material weight by alloy, fabrication hours and bought-out items, and it changes three times before the order is placed. The system must hold every revision and show which one the customer accepted. OctoForge's Sales module does exactly this: enquiry register, weight and alloy-based estimates with revisions, then a sales order with payment milestones.
2. The job is the unit of cost
Standard costing per SKU is meaningless when there is one SKU per order. What the management needs is budget versus booked cost per job, with schedule and progress alongside. That is the Projects module in OctoForge, and it is the view a managing director opens first.
3. Procurement and stores must speak heat numbers
Purchase orders and goods receipts have to land as heat-number lots with their mill certificates attached, and issues have to go from lot to job. Without that, material traceability is reconstructed by hand at dispatch, which is the most expensive time to do it.
4. Production tracks hours against workcenters, planned versus actual
Fabrication is labour. Work orders across cutting, rolling, welding, machining and testing, with planned versus actual hours, are how you learn whether the estimate was right and where the margin went.
5. Quality is a module, not an afterthought
Welder qualifications, a per-joint weld log with NDT, non-conformance reports and an ITP register with third-party inspection hold and witness points are what the customer's inspector will ask for. If the system cannot hold them, the shop keeps a parallel paper system.
6. Dispatch carries the documents and the shipping references
Mode, incoterm, packing list, LR, BL or AWB numbers, and the quality dossier. Milestone invoicing is triggered from here.
7. Finance links invoices to milestones, with GST IRN and AR ageing
ETO customers pay against milestones: advance, material, inspection, dispatch, commissioning. Invoices need to be milestone-linked, carry the GST IRN, and roll into an AR ageing view that finance actually uses.
8. Every number drills down to the record
The test of an ETO dashboard is simple: click any figure and you should land on the list of records that make it up, with the same filters applied. OctoForge carries a global filter set (financial year, date range, plant, industry, product line, customer) through every screen so a number on the executive dashboard reconciles with the jobs behind it.
If a system cannot do items 1, 3 and 5, it is not an ETO system, however good its general ledger is.
OctoForge was built by Third Octopus for exactly this profile of manufacturer. It runs as a server-rendered web application on PostgreSQL, on your own servers or hosted by us, and there is a live demo on the product page.
