Today, many production companies face a surprising challenge. They grow, acquire new markets, and expand their operations by increasing production capacity, but their IT systems simply cannot keep up with the systemic support. Often, despite multi-million-dollar revenues, they still rely on a collection of disparate programs, with Excel beating in their heart – a tool that, while universal, at some point becomes a burden. The story we will tell today is not an exception but a rule, demonstrating that chaos in the system is a real threat to scalability and efficiency.
Imagine a company that manufactures prefabricated elements. Every element, such as a pillar, wall, or separator, must have its own unique recipe. In the traditional approach, based on scattered tools, the process looked like this: drawings from CAD programs were printed and then manually rewritten. In practice, this meant that a large department of several dozen people dealt exclusively with writing drawings and creating recipes based on them.
After our implementation, files are imported at night, contract items are created, all components are developed, and finally, a long-term production plan is generated.
This shows that even the best "makeshift" solutions reach their limit at some point. This was also the case here, where Excel files, although theoretically functional, simply did not prove effective on a larger scale.
The company, looking for a solution, tested various options. They looked at different systems tailored to the manufacturing industry. But these systems had their limitations. One of them, although intended exclusively for prefabrication production, failed to meet expectations after being installed, configured, and demo tested for half a year.
Finally, they returned to Gardens-Software. This time, they approached the implementation in an extremely thorough and professional manner. Throughout the week, during workshops, they tested the Gardens system on their own data, which allowed them to verify its capabilities and suitability for their processes.
The key element that turned out to be a "game changer" was the product configurator. Instead of manually creating recipes for every variant, Gardens built a formula that automatically generated Bills of Materials (BOM). This allowed for the automation of the entire production preparation process.
Thanks to the configurator, the number of people in the recipe preparation department dropped by over 50%, allowing a portion of the department's working hours to be shifted to other tasks within the organization. This shows that investment in automation is not just about saving money, but above all, invaluable savings in time and optimization of human resources.
The implementation of Gardens Software allowed the company to organize the chaos and create one coherent system. This enabled development that was previously impossible due to the limitations of manual processes.
In the Gardens ERP system, the Project Manager has full control over every element of the project. They can check the status of every prefabricated element – whether it is in production, whether it is time-threatened, or whether it has already been installed. This is knowledge that cannot be obtained by relying on scattered Excel files.
Implementing a system like Gardens ERP is not just a change of tools, it is a change in the way of thinking about business management. It is an investment in independence and automation that allows companies to grow and scale without fearing the chaos that inevitably appears when scale outgrows the capabilities of Excel.
