Context
Our client is a European cloud consulting firm with years of business consultancy behind them. They had watched the same problems repeat across small and medium clients and decided to build the product they kept wishing existed.
Problem
Enterprise ERP is built for enterprises. A twenty-person mechanical contractor gets the complexity and the licence cost without the benefit, so most of them do not adopt one — and end up running the business across spreadsheets, wall planners and memory.
The specific things that break, in the sectors our client serves: equipment maintenance schedules that get missed, measuring instruments that fall out of calibration, documents with no revision control, training and medical certifications that lapse, and no visibility into whether a given project is actually making money.
Missing a deadline here is not an inconvenience. In regulated trades it means penalties.
Approach
Before building anything we worked with the client to decide which parts of a full ERP a small firm genuinely needs and which parts only add weight. That analysis is the product. Getting it wrong would have produced another enterprise system nobody in the target market could adopt.
We selected a cloud-based stack for availability and scaling, implemented encryption, role-based access and regular security audits, and designed the interface around users who are not software people and will not be trained for a week.
What we built
A modular cloud ERP where each module maps to something that actually goes wrong:
- Dashboard — interactive navigation across modules
- Deadlines — scheduling with customisable notifications, so obligations do not lapse
- Servicing — routine maintenance records for plant, equipment and machinery
- Human Resources — employee records, training schedules, medical visits, internal communication
- Measurement Tool — calibration status for instruments used in process control
- Problem Solving — problem logging, cause analysis, corrective actions, non-quality cost statistics
- Document Management — internal and external documents with revision status and distribution control
- Customers — client data and activity history
- Consultancy — recurring consulting contracts, planning and supervision
- Academy — course inventory, teacher qualification, training scheduling
- Projects — phases, budget, resources, work commitments, and live operating margin per project
- Admin — users, access modes, privileges
- Custom modules — extension on request
- Two languages — English and Italian
Results
The ERP is straightforward to set up and adapt across departments, which was the design goal. It gives owner-managers something they mostly did not have: live visibility of operating margin per project, and a system that remembers deadlines so nobody has to.
Metric slot — needs client approval. Firms deployed, modules in active use, or time saved per month on compliance and scheduling admin.
Note for Phase 5 review: the current live page’s results section mentions “tailored travel suggestions” and “higher conversion rates” — text copied from the Travel Booking CRM case study. It has been removed here. Do not reinstate it.
Related
Travel Booking CRM · Business & Technology Consulting