Manufacturing Software

Built this decade, not last century

Most manufacturing software was designed for a factory floor in an era of desktop terminals and a dedicated IT department, and it still behaves that way. Legacy ERP carries license and implementation costs that run well into five and six figures, takes months of consultants to stand up, and then expects your shop to reorganize itself around how the software thinks work should happen. Plenty of shops buy one, never finish the rollout, and quietly keep running the real business on spreadsheets.

MSA takes the other approach. It's built for the devices your people already carry — a phone at the bench, a tablet at a station, a scanner on the line — and it fits the way your shop already runs instead of asking you to change to match it. You can be configured and building in days rather than quarters, without a consultant on retainer. The capability is all here: bills of materials, nested assemblies, component-level reorder points, live costing, and a real kanban line. What isn't here is the six-figure quote and the year-long implementation.

Know your true production time per unit

Most shops cost a part from machine cycle estimates. That number is a fantasy — it ignores setup, fixturing, handling, inspection, rework, and the operator who stepped away to answer a question. Quote from it long enough and you'll find the parts you sell the most of are the ones losing you money.

MSA measures instead. Your people track time to the minute against each task, by user, billable or internal. Every run of a part you've built before adds to its history — and that history gives you the estimate, your actual average, and the one and two sigma spread of your real production times. Price to the average and the hard runs eat your margin; price with the whole distribution in front of you and you set a number that holds up across the batch. The more units you build, the sharper it gets.

Orders arrive from your store while you sleep

Connect your storefront — Shopify or WooCommerce — and every order drops straight onto the floor as a new job in the zone you choose. Nobody re-keys anything, nothing gets missed overnight, and the work is queued and ready before you walk in. The sync runs both directions: products you build push out to the store, and pricing changes carry across on their own, so the catalog your customers are buying from matches what you actually stock and what it actually costs.

What your store and your accounting can't do

Shopify, WooCommerce, and QuickBooks are all good at the job they were built for. A storefront is built to take an order. An accounting system is built to record what already happened. Neither was ever built to run production — and that's exactly where a shop that makes things hits the wall.

Your store doesn't know that the item someone just bought is built from eleven components, or that you're two short on one of them. It tracks a single flat quantity on a finished good and has no concept of what goes into it. QuickBooks can tell you what a part cost and what you sold it for, but it can't tell you the job is parked at the assembly station waiting on a bracket, or that this build took forty percent longer than the last one you quoted.

MSA sits between them and does the part neither one does. Orders come in from the store; assemblies, component inventory, purchasing, labor time, and floor status all get handled here; then the finished invoice exports to QuickBooks, Online or Desktop, with parts, labor, and tax mapped correctly. You keep the storefront your customers already know and the books your accountant already knows — and you stop asking either one to be a production system. Both get substantially more useful the moment they're no longer doing a job they weren't designed for.

The integrations are the whole point. Shopify, WooCommerce, and QuickBooks aren't bolted on here as an afterthought — they're wired deep enough that all three plus MSA behave like one connected process: the order comes in, the product gets built and tracked on the floor, the invoice lands in your books. That single connected process is exactly what a six-figure all-in-one system is sold on. You get the same result for a fraction of the cost, on tools your team already knows how to use.

Assemblies that check their own inventory

This is the heart of a manufacturing shop. When an order comes in for a product you build, assemblies automatically check inventory on the finished part. If it's on the shelf, it ships. If it's not, the system adds the assembly process to the job and draws down the component inventory needed to build it — so a sale automatically becomes a build order with the right parts already accounted for. Nested assemblies mean a sub-component that's itself built from parts works the same way, all the way down.

Component pricing that's never stale

Your assemblies are only as accurate as the cost of what goes into them. With Turn14 and your other connected suppliers syncing pricing, every component in an assembly stays current — so your build costs and your margins reflect today's prices, not last quarter's.

A true kanban line on the floor

Tag each job with a QR code and put bar-code scanners at each station along your production line. As a product moves from station to station, a quick scan moves the job through your zones automatically — no one updating a status by hand. That's a real pull-based kanban workflow, running off the floor itself instead of a whiteboard.

Sell your parts on the MSA B2B network

You don't only sell through your own website. Activate the ecommerce section, fill in the details about what your shop makes and sells, and choose exactly which parts you want to list for other shops to find on the MSA B2B network.

Other shops request a connection to you; you approve or reject each one, and set the discount you want to give that dealer. From then on, their purchase orders come across as new jobs on your floor — the same clean intake as your website orders. It turns the busywork of dealer relationships into one more queue you already know how to run.

The systems behind a real production shop

The tools are only half of it — running a shop like a factory is a discipline. We dug into exactly that with Richard Fielder, a controls engineer who builds the systems that assemble semi trucks at scale, across two episodes: 213 – Manufacturing Systems for Small Shops covers 5S, shadow boards, standard work, and building a real bill of materials, and 215 – Mastering Manufacturing goes deeper on lean, kanban, and error-proofing. MSA is built to put those principles to work on your floor.

MSA isn't a repair tool with an inventory tab bolted on, and it isn't a twenty-year-old ERP with a new coat of paint. Order sync, self-checking assemblies, live component costing, scanner-driven kanban, and a built-in B2B sales channel are here because building and selling a product is its own business — and it deserves software that treats it like one.