Getting shop-floor data into the ERP without paper

The situation

A manufacturer ran its business on SyteLine (now Infor CloudSuite Industrial), but the shop floor ran on paper. Operators wrote job and labor information down; someone keyed it into the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system later — sometimes days later. Inventory moves were recorded the same way. The result: job costs that lagged reality, inventory counts nobody quite believed, and an ERP that described last week better than today.

What we did

During his years in Infor’s professional consulting services group, the founder led SyteLine projects that closed exactly this gap — implementing shop-floor tracking and document repository systems integrated with the ERP, including Shop-Trak for production and labor reporting, barcoded inventory transactions using SyteLine with Bartender label printing, and Doc-Trak so drawings and job documents lived with the job rather than in a filing cabinet. The working pattern:

• Start with the transactions that hurt. Business process workshops to find where paper delays actually distort decisions — usually labor reporting and inventory moves — rather than automating everything at once.
• Put capture where the work happens. Barcode scanning and floor terminals so recording a transaction is a scan, not a form. If capture is slower than the work, operators will skip it, and the data dies.
• Validate against the ERP’s rules. Transactions post into SyteLine’s own job, inventory, and labor structures, so the shop-floor data and the accounting data are the same data.
• Test with the people who’ll use it. Design, testing, and training ran with operators and supervisors, not just the office.

How it played out

The gap between what happened on the floor and what the system said shrank from days to roughly real time. Job costing sharpened because labor and material hit the job as they occurred. Physical inventory counts got less dramatic because the perpetual records were fed continuously. Infor’s CloudSuite Industrial documentation covers the current platform’s capabilities; the hard part is fitting the data capture to how a shop actually moves.

What it means for a business like yours

Any Front Range job shop or light manufacturer with 20–100 people on the floor faces this trade: paper feels free, but you pay for it in late job costs and inventory surprises. The same field-to-office problem shows up for construction trades tracking labor across sites. Closing it is mostly integration and process design around the ERP you already own.

Next step

See our [[ERP consulting]] — if your ERP is fed by paper and re-keying, that’s the first thing worth fixing.