In this guide 6 sections
Choose a ready product when your routings, customer specifications and compliance papers look like those of other shops in your trade. Choose custom when your process, your customer’s paperwork or your regulator’s rules are unusual enough that the product would need constant workarounds. Test this with three real jobs. Do it before you decide.
Test how unusual your routing really is
Take your most awkward product and write its route from enquiry to dispatch on one sheet, then mark every step that a standard job shop would not have. Be honest about it.
Typical oddities include a lot that splits at heat treatment and merges again afterwards, or a forging that returns to the same boring mill three times. Some batches carry one heat number through every operation.
A ready product copes with a straight line. Real shops rarely run one. It struggles when the route loops back or branches into parallel paths, or when a rule says no operation four until inspection two is signed by quality.
- Loops back to an earlier work centre
- Splits and merges of lots
- Heat number or serial traced through every stage
- Approval gates between operations
Look at what your customers demand on paper
Some customers accept your delivery note and invoice. Others want a first article inspection report, a material test certificate, a packing format of their own and a portal upload for every single shipment.
List the documents your three largest customers ask for. Then check whether the ready product prints each one in the customer’s own format, or whether a clerk retypes them from a printout.
If retyping stays, the software has removed nothing. It has only put a screen in front of the work, and the clerk still keys every certificate of conformance by hand.
Check the compliance papers you must keep
Aerospace, medical device and automotive buyers often require traceability from raw material lot to shipped serial number, calibration records for every gauge and controlled copies of each procedure. Certification audits ask to see them.
Request one traceability query run live. Pick a shipped serial number. Then ask for its material lot, every operation, the operators who ran them and the inspection results, all on one screen while you watch.
A slide proves nothing here. If the answer needs an export to a spreadsheet, or a clerk cross checking mill test certificates by hand, count that effort as a cost.
Questions to put to any vendor
Refuse the scripted tour. Bring three real jobs and have the vendor key them into a demo system while you watch, including the one with the loop at heat treatment.
Ask whether the database and the programme code belong to you or to the vendor, and what an upgrade does to your own fields, reports and custom screens. Ask what happens to a dropped module.
From a custom builder, expect a working first release within weeks, a named maintainer and your right to host it elsewhere.
- Can it run my most awkward routing without a workaround?
- Which customer documents does it produce unchanged?
- How do upgrades treat my custom fields and reports?
- Who fixes a fault on a Saturday shift?
- How do I export all my data if I leave?
A middle path and your next step
Many mid size manufacturers end up with both. A ready product runs orders, stock and accounts. A small custom module then covers the one process that sets the business apart, such as a customer portal or a traceability record.
That limits risk. You buy the common parts, such as stock ledgers and purchase orders, and you build only the unusual ones, such as a first article report for one demanding buyer.
This week, put your three awkward jobs on one page and send it to each shortlisted vendor, because the replies separate real fit from a polished demo.
Fit test worksheet
A worksheet with three columns for three real jobs. Rows cover the routing steps that are not standard, the customer documents required, the traceability records kept, the outside processes used and the approval gates. A final row for each job records whether a ready product ran it unchanged, with a workaround, or not at all.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Is custom software always more expensive than a ready product?
Not always. A ready product with heavy workarounds, extra licences and manual retyping can cost more over time, so compare the total effort across several years of use. Do not stop at the first invoice.
Can we start with a ready product and move to custom later?
Yes, if you can export your data cleanly. Ask for a full export of parts, routings, orders and history before you sign, so the option stays open when the shop outgrows the product.
Who in the company should judge the demo?
Invite production, quality and dispatch. They know where the awkward jobs live, and they will use the system daily, so their objections count more than a director’s first impression of the demo.