Custom MES systems, ERP integrations, shop floor data collection, and real-time production dashboards — built for the SCADA-to-MES-to-ERP data flow that modern manufacturing requires. 20+ years building software for Michigan manufacturers and industrial operations nationwide.
Here is what we see when we walk into a 50-person manufacturing shop for the first time: a production scheduler working from a color-coded Excel workbook with 47 tabs. A shop floor supervisor tracking WIP on a whiteboard that gets erased and redrawn every shift. An operations manager pulling numbers from three different systems to build a report that is already outdated by the time it reaches the plant manager's desk.
This is not an exaggeration. 68% of small manufacturers still use Excel as their primary production planning tool. And 88% of those spreadsheets contain material errors — formula mistakes, broken cell references, copy-paste errors that silently propagate wrong numbers across the entire workbook. In manufacturing, a wrong number is not an accounting inconvenience. It is a missed shipment, a scrapped batch, a machine running the wrong job for an entire shift.
The deeper problem is not the spreadsheet itself. It is the gap between what your business needs and what off-the-shelf software provides. SAP and Oracle serve billion-dollar enterprises with thousand-person implementation teams. Generic cloud ERPs handle accounting and invoicing but treat manufacturing as an afterthought. And the manufacturing-specific tools — Epicor, Plex, IQMS — require significant customization to match how your specific plant actually operates. 61% of manufacturers already prefer somewhat customized solutions because they have learned that one-size-fits-all does not fit their shop floor.
FreedomDev builds the software that fills this gap. We are based in Zeeland, Michigan — the heart of the state's manufacturing corridor, between Detroit's automotive supply chain, Grand Rapids' furniture industry, and West Michigan's metalworking and plastics clusters. For 20+ years, we have built custom manufacturing software for companies that have outgrown spreadsheets but cannot justify a multi-million-dollar ERP implementation. We understand the ISA-95 manufacturing stack because we have integrated every layer of it, from PLC data collection to MES shop floor tracking to ERP business planning.
20-30% of inventory in manufacturing organizations is obsolete — not because the product itself is outdated, but because tracking systems are. When your inventory system cannot tell you what you actually have on the shelf, in real time, you overbuy raw materials, miss reorder points, and discover shortages only when a machine operator walks to the stockroom and finds an empty bin. Custom software that connects your shop floor to your business systems eliminates this entirely.
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Finance runs QuickBooks or Sage. Procurement uses a separate purchasing system. Production scheduling lives in Excel. Quality logs are on paper. Sales takes orders in a CRM that nobody else can see. Every department has its own version of the truth, and none of them agree. When the plant manager asks a simple question — 'How many units did we ship last month and what was the margin?' — the answer requires pulling data from four systems, reconciling it manually, and hoping nobody made a copy-paste error. Custom software integrates these systems into a single data architecture where every department works from the same numbers.
The most common question a plant manager cannot answer in real time: 'Where is job 4782 right now?' Without a system that tracks work-in-progress across operations, the answer requires walking the floor, finding the job traveler, and asking the operator. Multiply that across 50 active jobs and you have a supervisor spending half their day playing detective instead of managing production. Real-time shop floor data collection — barcode scanning, tablet-based operator input, or machine integration — replaces the whiteboard-and-clipboard workflow with live status visible to everyone who needs it.
A 15-person shop can get away with Excel scheduling. At 50 people with multiple work centers, it falls apart. The scheduler cannot see machine availability, operator assignments, and material constraints simultaneously in a spreadsheet. When a rush order comes in, replanning requires hours of manual adjustment. When a machine goes down, the ripple effects across the schedule are invisible until jobs start missing due dates. And the formula errors — 88% of spreadsheets contain them — mean the schedule was wrong before the first disruption even hit.
Without real-time data from the floor, your quoted job costs and actual job costs diverge silently. Scrap rates are estimated, not measured. Labor hours are entered at the end of the week from memory, not tracked per operation. Material usage assumes the BOM is accurate, but nobody updates it when the operator uses a different gauge of steel because the specified one was not in stock. You discover you lost money on a job three weeks after it shipped — too late to learn anything useful. Accurate job costing requires data capture at the point of production, not retroactive data entry.
Many plants run critical systems from the late 1990s or early 2000s — a COBOL-based inventory database, a Windows XP machine running an HMI that controls a $2M piece of equipment, an Access database that one engineer built 15 years ago that somehow became the production scheduling system. These cannot be ripped out and replaced in a Big Bang migration. The plant runs 24/5 or 24/7. Downtime for a software migration is not an option. The path forward is incremental modernization — wrapping legacy systems with modern APIs, migrating data in stages, and building new capabilities alongside existing ones.
You bought an ERP three years ago. The base license was $150K. The implementation partner quoted $300K for configuration. Two years later, you have spent $800K and the system still does not handle your shop floor routing the way your operations actually work. Every change request is a $20K–$50K consulting engagement. Annual maintenance fees keep rising. This is the manufacturing ERP trap: the software is not built for your specific process, so you pay forever to make it pretend to be. A custom-built system costs the same or less upfront and you own it — no annual license fees, no vendor lock-in, no $30K change orders for a field modification.
We spent $800K customizing an off-the-shelf ERP over three years and it still did not match how our floor actually runs. FreedomDev built us a custom MES and ERP integration in six months for less than half that — and it worked from day one because they built it around our process, not the other way around.
A Manufacturing Execution System built for your specific shop floor workflow. Job dispatch, operator work instructions, real-time WIP tracking via barcode or RFID, quality data capture at each operation, and machine status monitoring. Unlike off-the-shelf MES platforms that require months of configuration, a custom MES matches your routing, your work centers, and your quality requirements from day one. It sits between your ERP and your equipment, translating business orders into shop floor actions and feeding production data back to business systems in real time.
Learn moreYour ERP handles finance, purchasing, and customer orders. Your shop floor generates production data every minute. The gap between these two worlds is where manufacturers lose visibility and money. FreedomDev builds integration layers that connect Epicor, SAP, NetSuite, Plex, or any ERP system to your shop floor — using OPC-UA for machine data, REST APIs for application data, and ISA-95 standards for the SCADA-to-MES-to-ERP data flow. No more manual re-keying. No more end-of-week data dumps. Real-time bidirectional data flow.
Learn moreBarcode scanning stations at each work center. Tablet-based operator input for quality checks, downtime reasons, and scrap reporting. Machine integration that captures cycle counts, run times, and fault codes automatically. Every data point timestamped, attributed to an operator and a job, and available instantly on production dashboards. This is the first step most manufacturers take — it does not require replacing any existing system, just adding a data capture layer on top of your current process.
Learn moreTV-mounted dashboards on the shop floor showing real-time OEE, job status, and machine utilization. Executive dashboards showing daily output, quality metrics, and on-time delivery rates. Supervisor views showing operator performance, downtime trends, and bottleneck identification. Built on your actual production data — not sample data or best-case projections. When the plant manager walks in at 6 AM, they see exactly what happened on the night shift without asking anyone.
Learn moreWe wrap your legacy systems with modern APIs so new applications can read and write data without touching the old code. We migrate data in stages — historical records first, then active transactions, then real-time feeds. We build new user interfaces that pull from both old and new data sources during the transition. When the legacy system is fully deprecated, we cut it over cleanly. This approach keeps your plant running throughout the entire modernization. No downtime. No data loss. No 'go live' weekend where everything breaks.
Learn moreYour machines generate data constantly — cycle counts, temperatures, pressures, fault codes, run states. Most of that data stays trapped in the PLC or SCADA system, visible only to maintenance technicians. FreedomDev builds the middleware layer that extracts machine data via OPC-UA, Modbus, MQTT, or EtherNet/IP and routes it into your MES or ERP. This enables predictive maintenance (detect anomalies before failures), accurate OEE calculation (based on actual machine states, not operator estimates), and automated production counting (no manual entry).
Learn more| Metric | FreedomDev | Generic SaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation Cost (50-person shop) | $150K–$400K total, you own it | $2M–$100M+ for SAP; $500K–$2M for mid-market ERP + customization |
| Annual Licensing Fees | $0 — you own the code | $50K–$300K+ per year in recurring license fees |
| Time to Production Use | 3–6 months for core modules | 12–24 months average ERP implementation |
| Change Requests | Direct dev team, $5K–$15K typical change | $20K–$50K per change order through implementation partner |
| Shop Floor Fit | Built for your routing, work centers, and process | Configured to approximate your process within ERP constraints |
| Vendor Lock-In | Open source stack, your codebase, portable | Proprietary platform, data export limitations, switching costs |
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