Small biz manfacturing software

pboae

Hello all :-)

I think I may be being overly hopeful here, but I am trying to find some (cheap) software to help with a small business problem.

My business-partner-to-be makes bespoke items, she wants me to take over the admin and sales side of things so she can get on with making stuff. So I am looking for some basic software for stock and time control in manufacturing.

I want to be able to select a standard item and then add additional options to it. Then I want to know how long it will take (by adding the time needed for each option onto that needed for the standard product), how much it will cost us and what we should charge for it.

So for example say she was making clothes, I might select dress type A and the software would know that this means 4 hours, £40, 4 metres of material, 1 zip, 1 button. Then I add on material option B which is more expensive but has no time implications, and all buttons instead of a zip, the buttons mean 2 hours more work, so have an additional time implication, and an additional materials charge, but the price (and time) component of the zip would be dropped.

So once I had been through all the options with the customer and we agreed on a final design I would know how much to charge, how much time to allocate to it and what stock would be required to make it.

Ideally I would like this to link to a stock control system so that I can see what we have in and when we need to order more of things.

Sage have a few options that would work, but they are way out of our price range (£4k+). I am muddling along in Excel at the moment, but it is so laborious, there has to be a more efficient way.

Does anyone know of a cheaper basic programme that will do at least some of this?

fguk

What you are looking for is Bill Of Materials (often referred to as BOM)software, with some extras attached. This is pretty specialised software, and finding a cheap solution wont be easy. In fact I think a Sage solution at £4k+ is pretty cheap in this market.

I come at this from the perspective of being involved with a company that creates this software for companies, often bespoke and built around the existing finance package. I am not advertising though, just advising.

quick tip...

"free BOM software" including quotes, entered into Google gave some promising results.

Good luck in your search

richt71

You could post your software need on programming websites elance.com or rentacoder.com. You'll get coders all over the world bidding to develope the software for you. It may be cheaper than the ready made off the shelf solutions. I suspect it'll still run into 4 figures though.

pboae

I did speak to a programmer about it initially, and her view was that I'd be better with an off the shelf product, because it would cost less than having something written for us. I didn't know there were websites were I could put it out to 'tender' though, thanks.

Thanks also for the info on BOM, that has been a huge help, now I am searching under the right term I am finding lots more stuff, I have a huge amount of new info to wade through now.

I will post back once I've had time to go through it all in case the info can help someone else one day.

Thanks again :-)

buglawton

Cheap is the key if you are a small co, have a look at http://www.xtuple.com/pricing.php