For smaller manufacturers — 20 to 200 people
Smaller manufacturers have nobody spare to run the project.
Every argument for a manufacturing execution system assumes somebody is free to implement it. In a business of twenty to two hundred people, nobody is. The production manager is on the floor, the quality manager is answering a customer audit, and the person who would write the specification is the person the specification would take away.
That is not a reason to run a factory on a whiteboard and four spreadsheets. It is a reason to be exact about what a smaller manufacturer can actually absorb — how the software gets installed, who administers it on the Tuesday afterwards, and what survives the day the one person who understood it hands in their notice.
What a smaller manufacturer actually has
Four things that are true at sixty people and not at six hundred.
None of these is a shortcoming. They are the ordinary conditions of a business that makes things profitably without carrying overhead it does not need. They are also the four things an enterprise MES is not designed around.
There is no project team
The person who would specify the system is the person who would be missing from the floor while they did it. Nobody here is seconded to anything. Whoever leads it leads it on top of the job they already have.
There is no IT department
There is one person who is good with computers, or a managed service provider on a contract billed by the ticket. Either way, “your IT team will configure the VPN” is not a sentence that describes anything real.
The payback has to start this quarter
A year of implementation before the first useful number is not caution, it is a year. The business has to see something working while the decision is still fresh enough to defend.
No reference looks like you
The case studies in this category are written about plants ten times your size, with a continuous improvement function and a controls engineer. They tell you the software works. They tell you nothing about whether it works with eleven people on days.
Why the enterprise answer does not simply shrink
Enterprise manufacturing software is built to be configured for anyone, which means it has to be configured by someone — and that someone bills by the day. The implementation is not a surcharge on the software, it is the larger half of the project, and it scales with the consultant’s calendar rather than with the size of your floor. A ten-machine site does not get a tenth of the implementation.
The packaging works the same way. A suite is sold as a suite because it was built as one, so the module you came for arrives surrounded by the eleven you did not, and you end up administering all twelve. Then the thing has to be run: users provisioned, releases tested, a server kept alive, an integration somebody owns. In a business with a part-time IT person, that administration is the real cost, and it never appears on the quote.
None of this is a vendor behaving badly. It is what a business model aimed at a thousand-person plant does when you point it at a sixty-person one. The rest of this page is what SmartFactory does instead, and all of it is checkable — in a trial, on your own floor, before a purchase order exists.
Who installs it
One outbound connection, and an electrician who already comes on site.
The install question in a smaller factory is not architectural, it is practical: who physically does this, what do they need from us, and how long is the floor disturbed for.
- The network requirement is one outbound connection on TCP 443 from a site gateway. No inbound rule, no port forward, no VPN, no static IP, no DMZ host — nothing on your side listens for the internet, which is the answer your managed service provider needs before they will quote anything.
- The gateway is a Windows service or a Linux container on a box you already have, brought up by one installer and a single-use enrolment code that expires in fifteen minutes. It supports silent install, so a managed rollout stays a rollout.
- The hardware is off the shelf — standard smart meters, volt-free relay sensors, clip-on CTs and Zebra printers. Nothing proprietary to buy back from us, clamped on rather than rewired, and your own electrician can fit it.
- A machine with no network port is not a dead end: four ways onto a press, including one that needs nothing but a clip-on power clamp. A mixed estate of new and old machines can be reporting into the same system inside a day or two.
- Meters and devices are configured afterwards from the cloud through the same connection, so adding a machine next year does not mean a site visit or a laptop in a switch cupboard.
- A per-site health page shows broker, meters, OPC UA sessions and printers as separate chips with counts and last-seen times — “is it still collecting?” is a page rather than a phone call to the one person who knows.
The full architecture, written for whoever does your IT: For your IT team.
What you can absorb this quarter
Start with the one thing the business is already shouting about.
Projects this size rarely stall on the software. They stall because the scope agreed in the meeting is larger than anyone has hours for, so month four arrives with nothing running and the enthusiasm spent.
- SmartFactory is modular: four packages, from quality-only through to the full system, each a complete product on its own. You buy the one that matches the pressure you are under today — a customer audit, or not knowing what the floor did last week.
- Moving up later re-implements nothing. The modules you already have keep their history and their numbers, so a monitoring deployment does not get unpicked to add scheduling eighteen months on.
- It is a run rate rather than a capital project with a go-live date, so you can start on one cell and let the cost follow your production rather than lead it. How the pricing behaves is published in full, including the rules the product enforces on us.
- Run it alongside whatever you have today, on one cell or one site, and compare after a quarter. Nothing has to come out for this to start, and a side-by-side on a single cell uses very little.
- Made Smarter match-funded grants of up to £20,000 are open to eligible manufacturers in nine English regions, with production monitoring in scope — the regional eligibility detail is here.
What each module does: the platform — nine modules on one data model.
Who gets to use it
In a sixty-person factory, everybody does three jobs.
Per-seat licensing is a model designed for an organisation with job titles. Here the setter also books the job, the quality manager also plans the week, and a director also walks the floor at six. Counting seats prices out exactly the people the system is for.
- Unlimited users on every plan, always. Operators, quality, planners, maintenance, directors — there is no seat to count and no licence conversation before somebody useful is allowed to log in.
- That is what makes shop-floor screens viable: put it on every tablet, office monitor and andon TV without a per-device cost quietly deciding how many machines get a screen.
- Roles decide what each person sees, so a production manager and a quality manager each get a board built for their question rather than one dashboard everybody ignores.
- An operator station is not a user account, and a display token is read-only and scoped to one board — a tablet bolted to a press is not another login somebody has to administer.
- A skills matrix records who is signed off on what and validates the assignment board against it, so Thursday’s cover plan lives in the software rather than in somebody’s head.
When the one person leaves
Most of what runs a smaller factory is in somebody’s head.
It is the quiet risk in every business this size, and an implementation-heavy system compounds it: a configuration only the consultant understood, sitting on top of a process only the setter understood. The useful test of a production system is what is left when a person walks out.
- How a part is made is drawn in a process designer, and the drawing runs the job — which operation, which material, in which order. Written down by the work itself, rather than by somebody finding an afternoon to document it.
- Process versions carry effectivity dates, so a works order raised last month still resolves the process that was in force last month, and a two-year-old job stays reproducible after two process changes.
- Machine states are derived from real cycle data rather than declared. Nobody types a status into SmartFactory, so the record of what the floor did does not depend on anyone remembering to keep it.
- Specifications go through a review and approval workflow in which the approver cannot be the author, and every measurement is stamped with the specification revision in force when it was taken. A capability figure from before the handover is still defensible afterwards.
- Stock and traceability sit on one append-only ledger, so “which job consumed this lot” has an answer on a screen rather than an answer in a leaver’s filing.
- A new starter gets guided walkthroughs by role inside the product, driving the real pages rather than a slide deck — the trial tenant doubles as the training one.
The quality trail in detail: Quality, RFT and SPC. The process designer: Process designer, scheduling and tool changes.
How you evaluate it without a project
A running factory, the same day, without involving anybody.
The trouble with reference customers ten times your size is that you cannot interrogate them. You can interrogate software. The point of the trial is that an evaluation costs an afternoon rather than a quarter of somebody’s year.
- Register and you get your own private tenant the same day, running six simulated machines with realistic cycles, energy, jobs and quality data. A browser and the login we send you is the whole requirement — nothing to install, no hardware, no card, and no involvement from whoever does your IT.
- Every module is switched on, so what you are judging is the product rather than a cut-down version of it. Change things, schedule jobs, print labels, then reset to a clean factory in one click.
- The rate card sits on screen inside the product, so you can map your own parts and volumes onto it and have your number before anybody rings you.
- When you have seen enough, we clip meters onto a handful of your real machines and the same login starts showing your factory instead of the simulated one. Your configuration, users and reason codes carry straight over, so the trial is not a throwaway.
- The honest limit of a simulated factory is that it proves the software and not your floor — which is what the pilot on real machines is for. What a trial can and cannot tell you is written up in full, including the questions worth sending us first.
Who answers when you ring
No channel partner between you and the people who wrote it.
A smaller manufacturer feels the support arrangement more than a large one does, because there is no internal team to absorb the gap. Software development, on-site installation, a staffed UK support desk and project delivery are all in-house at Ashton-under-Lyne. The engineers who build SmartFactory are the ones who fit the meters, configure the gateway and pick up the call, and the people who answer your security questionnaire are the people who wrote the code.
Releases ship monthly and are discussed with the people using them rather than at them, which counts for more at this size than at any other. When there are sixty of you, the person with the awkward requirement is you, and being able to put it to the development team directly is worth more than a roadmap webinar.
Worth weighing honestly: the product is young. The company behind it is not — OneTek has spent seventeen years inside UK manufacturing businesses, on their networks, their machines and their shop floors, and still does that work for manufacturers who are not buying software at all. It is the reason this system knows what a preheat station is, and what a two-hundred-machine estate does to a switch. More about who builds it.
Find out in an afternoon, not a financial year.
A trial is a running factory the same day you register, every module switched on, nothing to install. If a manufacturing system cannot show you something useful before you have committed anything, it was never going to fit a business this size.