Custom Software for Advanced Manufacturing

Level 4 ledger, Level 3 event bus

In the Purdue hierarchy ISA-95 formalises, sensors sit at Levels 0–1, PLC and SCADA at Level 2, MES at Level 3, ERP at Level 4. ERPStack keeps the manufacturing ledger in PostgreSQL and lifts production performance up as Event-Driven Architecture messages on Apache Kafka, so a work order is never keyed twice. Tags over OPC UA (IEC 62541) or MQTT Sparkplug B — namespace spBv1.0, Protocol Buffers payloads — land in TimescaleDB instead: a 1-second tag stream against a ledger write is textbook OLAP vs. OLTP Database Partitioning.

BOM revisions, never BOM updates

A multi-level bill of materials is the one manufacturing table you cannot mutate in place. ERPStack models BOM lines, routings and work centres in Drizzle ORM with effectivity dates, so an engineering change order writes a revision row and a 2019 work order still resolves to what it was built from. Scrap, yield and cost variance reconcile because the denominator never moved — an Immutable Audit Trail as a side effect.

// Drizzle ORM on PostgreSQL — BOM lines revision, never update
      export const bomLines = pgTable('bom_lines', {
        parentItem: text('parent_item').notNull(),
        childItem: text('child_item').notNull(),
        qtyPer: numeric('qty_per', { precision: 18, scale: 6 }),
        ecoNumber: text('eco_number'),            // change order
        effectiveFrom: timestamp('effective_from').notNull(),
        effectiveTo: timestamp('effective_to'),   // null = current
      });

The formats that move the goods

Automotive and aerospace supply chains do not run on REST. They run on ANSI ASC X12 — 850 Purchase Order, 830 Planning Schedule with Release Capability, 862 Shipping Schedule, 856 Ship Notice/Manifest, 810 Invoice, 997 Functional Acknowledgment — and on UN/EDIFACT DELFOR. ERPStack applies Idempotency in API Design at the interchange control number, so a re-sent 862 cannot double-book a shipment. Epicor, SAP S/4HANA, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Odoo are genuinely strong here, and replacing them in one cut is the failure mode; the Strangler Fig Migration Pattern moves order entry first and keeps legacy MRP authoritative until the schedule reconciles.

What it costs, and when a licence beats a build

ERPStack publishes the band rather than quoting it on discovery: Standard B2B Operations at $25,000 – $60,000 over 6–8 weeks; Compliance & Multi-Tenant at $60,000 – $150,000 over 10–16 weeks; Enterprise Scale Infrastructure at $150,000 – $250,000+ over 18–24 weeks. A single-plant manufacturer with one EDI trading partner, a two-level BOM and no historian does not belong at the top of that ladder, and quite possibly does not belong on a build at all — Epicor, Dynamics 365 and Odoo ship a standard MRP module, and reproducing it in TypeScript is money spent reaching parity. The build earns its fee where the fit does not: multi-level BOM with change-order effectivity, machine data feeding OEE that has to reconcile to scrap, and enough X12 partners and shop-floor terminals that per-seat licensing starts to dominate the bill. That is a one-time fee against a licence that renews every year, and the honest comparison is over three years, not one.