First off, congrats, this is no small feat, well done.
A question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here?
And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (including my own!), and that is that software designed for one single hoster is often more complex to deploy and built in a different way, whereas software designed primarily to self-host looks much simpler. As an example, installing Wordpress or Odoo is relatively simple, with basic frontend webserver config and easy to run open source databases. Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy. What's the strategy here? Despite having the skills for it, I'm not sure I'd ever consider self-hosting Carbon, and maybe that's good for Carbon as a business, but it's also less good for the ecosystem.
> Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy
Perhaps this could be addressed by providing a Pulumi or Terraform program?
It's not just about the initial deployment, although these may help. If you're running Wordpress, the question "why is it slow" is pretty limited in scope – you need a faster webserver, database, or maybe need those two to be closer to each other. A simplification but not much of one. For this, is it the app server, the task queue, or one of several other components, or is it in the Supabase layer, or is it a dependency that someone else runs... etc.
Figuring out issues get more complex, scaling gets more complex, backup and recovery get more complex, now you need monitoring for it all too, and with many services the complexity multiplies.
All of that complexity is somewhat justified for a team that exists to build and operate the system (i.e. SaaS), but doesn't really work for a team who exist to build something else and have just been tasked with operating this.
I’m the owner of a smallish furniture manufacturer. About 15 employees. I built out the order management system myself because nothing really fit our process.
After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.
yeah, good point. the docs could definitely use some work. check this out if you're interested. it's not complete, but it goes through the software pretty well: https://learn.carbon.ms
i don't know if you build anything custom, but we do have a configurator
What exactly is an “ERP”? Virtually everything I read about them or on the website of products, is so vague and broad that it sounds like “it’s everything”. How would a business know they need this product? For the big ERPs out there, is there a clear guide with screenshots that show what they concretely do?
Basically the core functionality is to track inventory, manage purchase orders in, and sales orders out. Generally that's also linked to accounting so basically as you buy and sell stuff everything is linked to your accounting ledgers.
Then there's MRP (M for manufacturing) which is usually an option - for when stuff that you're selling isn't the same as what you're buying.
So the ERP/MRP manages bills of materials for items (basically parts lists), when you want to sell something you make a sales order, it sees if you have the inventory on hand to actually make the things, and if not you can generate purchase orders, and then once you have everything it can create work orders which basically tell your factory people to go and turn the input parts into a product so you can sell it. Invoices are created from sales orders, and workers time is tracked on the purchase order, so the cost of goods and labour is automatically tracked in your financial reports as well as the revenue etc.
It's a type of software that lets business manage and automate core processes in one integrated system. Typically linking finance/accounting with operations like sales, inventory and manufacturing.
I've worked on a erp for a short while and I genuinely still don't know. The amount of bullshit surrounding them is certainly staggering.
I now work on a large company that is about to introduce a large new erp system and is not only investing billions into that change with the mother of all vendor lock ins; but we're also internally transforming the company so that the erp will work. But no, we can't afford the two days of estimated work to upgrade to c++20 as it's not necessary right now.
I'm not sure how things are now, but I once worked tangentially on a mid-sized corporation ERP rollout. At that time it was not unusual to have an entire department at the ERP-adopting company called "Change Management." Any company-wide process change was managed by the Change Management department.
Oh that brings memories! Been in quite a few of those.
Basically the ERP vendor sells you the software and estimates that you need a couple months and a couple consultants for the migration and integration, plus a few users of your product as guinea pigs. It is expensive as heck but well, at least it is only two months (plus hotels, plane and food).
After two months you’re halfway done according to the vendor but you need some extra helping hands for the harder features, so you get more consultants, and a department to handle change. You get a few posters.
After a couple years you have eight consultants and a consulting product manager still doing the migration work, plus eight more freelancing ERP experts, and about four engineers from your own team working full time on apis. The work is halfway done, though! Your non-tech staff is juggling between two products and dissenting voices start to appear. You make and distribute t-shirts with texts like “Project Evolution” or “Project Future” to ensure everyone is on board.
After two more years you are almost halfway there, but staff turnover guarantees that people don’t remember the productivity of yore, and the new ERP is judged as good enough. People have gotten used to it, the jokes aren’t as vicious as before, and only a handful of people were fired in the previous years due to the company going severely over budget. But hey nobody gets fired for buying IBM so the boss who decided to blow 15 million on it is fine.
Do you have any users yet? What’s your target size manufacturing company? I’ve been in the industrial software space for a while, and at least for large MFG, you only see the major players, with SAP being the most common. There is this “UNS” concept that’s been around for 5ish years now and has caught steam (unified namespace, google and you’ll find it). It has holes from a technical standpoint, but it will get attention if you can show how it works with factory data in a UNS. Happy to help if i can. I work at a company that does industrial dataops now, focused on getting shop floor data in/out of the factory with context.
Hey I'd love to learn more about your thoughts. We have a discord if you'd like to join.
I see the market like this:
- small job shops and startups are using it now (we have 5 customers today using it to run operations)
- mid-market manufacturers with 200-ish employees are where i'd like to go, but many want all the accounting baked in and that's still a WIP
- large players have to use SAP for accounting because they have multiple-ledgers, but i see this as a good "custom MES starting point"
TLDR Brad: I’d suggest you look at any customers with potential scale, who should have a custom SKU/BOM/order mix. 3D printing and full custom made to order products will have this mix, and it gets increasing painful when scaling past 100s of orders per month. One will find there will be in-house systems and workaround to deal with this complication, which should be fixed decently once a company is in the 1000s of orders per month by necessity of survival.
A bit more background as there is various bits of advice in these threads, and I will provide my take with scaling such a startup. Third-Party ERPs from the big vendors are purchased by Finance and are needed for validation pre-IPO and into the IPO (no one is going to trust something else without proof of success in publicly traded companies and it will be a red flag if there is no use cases in reputable publicly traded companies). ERPs are financial focused (like EHRs in healthcare), and their vendors will happily upsell the other addons like MES/BOMs, which are fine for generic manufacturing with limited SKUs. However in a world of customized/personalized SKUs, traditional ERP/finances solutions cannot be easily used to run manufacturing operations. I’d recommend focusing on integrating into ERPs (tack on custom IDs to the related objects) and automating them rather than building the full financial accounting/taxes into the platform. For example, your platform will still track the BOM details, but the totals will get synced for overall financial reporting for the various ledgers and not all the sub-assemblies which the ledgers don’t care about. This keeps the MES purpose built (and the big vendor ERP keeping simple books) and the ultimate source of truth what’s happening on the floor without getting into the accounting details that matter for tax optimization and not manufacturing operations.
really well said, imo! it's interesting how there's two views of ERP. one is a G/L + anything needed to support it. and the other is more of a tool that supports operations and planning. i started with a G/L, but have kept it hidden even now, because my thought it that everything else should be good first, and support the G/L second.
Gotta have your G/L tied to your whole system. How else can you do project billing or Make-To-order quoting and have it roll your Cogs and such over to the G/L....
We built a lot of the custom ERP related systems outside of our ERP. Leaving the financials to the big boys and just talk to the ERP. It's working really well.
We recently replaced Oracle financials for two of our customers-mid size manufacturers doing around $10B/yr in revs. We’re pretty small so grateful they trust us with that level of work.
agree. it's very impressive how SAP maintains multiple ledgers for different regulations in different countries. i'm not going to replace that any time soon. i think even tesla uses SAP for accounting, but something like this for the rest.
Congrats on the launch! Love seeing modern manufacturing systems.
Do you handle supplier master data management? We're seeing procurement teams struggle with duplicate vendors in their ERPs - same supplier gets entered 5 different ways, messes up spend analytics and supplier relationships.
We're building AI agents for business data cleanup (still in stealth, docs coming). Manufacturing/supply chain customers seem to have the messiest supplier data - way worse than other industries.
Curious if this is something you're thinking about for Carbon? (CTO here, happy to chat)
Nice! Yeah, a typeahead works to a degree. I imagine that's searching their own instance vs calling out to a standardized DB you manage?
Raw materials is definitely a different animal, so auto-generating definitely works. I know a company where that's all they do - they manually pour over supplier specs to get all the model names.
Agent approach looks super cool. I see the supplier search piece happening there.
We've mapped out ~265M+ businesses globally. We're thinking about this as a data infra angle where products can tap into our system to access all the world's businesses. We're getting requests for processing millions of ERP records to clean/standardize, plus semantic supplier search across our full dataset.
This is interesting but what about non standard items? There are plenty of cases where the raw material might theoretically have the same name, but was made with a different process by each manufacturer or the resulting item from different manufacturers has slightly diverged for various reasons.
Interesting. Was that a MDM focused product for healthcare or something more general infra wise like Informatica?
I don't have much context in the healthcare space and the challenges that exist there. We've been mainly talking to people in fintech, supply chain, and sales & marketing, which is primarily where I ran into this at past roles.
This is all cool but i think traditional erp systems are going to get eaten away by software like Optifye.ai, using vision for counting, and then certifying through manual data entry. If there’s no Vision integrated into your erp, you’ll get eaten away by competitors who run faster lean teams through using such systesm
I am setting up a large manufacturing operation now.
Red flags with your site are: (a) seems to assume a sales order based process; (b) seems to assume B2C sales via Stripe; (c) has a huge bunch of layers but no actual user view.
I would suggest beginning your page with "Assumptions". In there, list all the things you have assumed.
Then I would suggest having a section for each area: ERP, MES, whatever, with a screenshot or two and a quick table based comparison vs. other tools.
Finally, include something about the layers you used and what they do. Nobody really cares about that stuff, it's almost developer documentation rather than user documentation.
Congrats on this! Quite interesting for me as I have been working on vertical ERPs for a while, not at all related to manufacturing and as far as I know, accounting is usually the core of any ERP. Who is your ICP at companies in your target groups - ops managers? I’ve mostly seen CFOs being the drivers behind ERP purchasing.
Wow how have I never heard of OFBiz? I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good self hosted erp forever and thought ERPnext was as good as it gets but this sounds super.
The modular ERP/MES/QMS approach is interesting and challenges traditional manufacturing processes. Most manufacturers obsess over single source of truth. (I.e. ensuring a part number means exactly the same thing across planning, production, and quality systems.) On the one hand, breaking these into separate apps creates potential data consistency risks. On the other hand, it could enable much better adoption. Start with MES for shop floor visibility then add QMS for compliance later rather than massive all-in-one ERP implementations that often fail. Curious, how are you handling data consistency across modules? What's been the feedback from your current or potential customers on this approach versus traditional monolithic ERP systems?
hey founder here. they are separate apps, but use the same database, and same api. i'm also a big believer in single-source-of-truth and the compound startup idea
i don't know a ton about ERPNext's manufacturing capabilities, but i think there are really great for these reasons:
- free to try
- open source
- well-documented
- great developer community
one big difference is in the data model. in ERPNext, everything is a doctype, and there's some standard hooks.
in carbon, there are hundreds of different tables. each ui is it's own set of react components, so it's a lot more manufacturing-specific and a little more opinionated.
Hm, interesting. With how slow the testimonial carousel on the web page is though, I don't have much confidence that Carbon is performant either. How many pieces of that (frankly massive) techstack require dedicated network trips?
As a UX person, this is the type of stuff I love to see posted here. So many people don't understand how atrocious the UX is in non-sexy career tracks such as manufacturing. One question I have is how users have reacted to your leftmost nav bar. 13 icons is a lot, do you show them all at one time, or do they dynamically appear based on the user role of the person who's logged in at the time?
like a cmd+k type deal or something different? we do have cmd+k navigation to everywhere currently + global search, but i worry that less sophisticated users might not use it.
Please share the feedback for keyboard shortcuts from real users. Now shops in India tend to use touchscreens or have staff fiddle with laptops with tiny touchpads, but lots of shops use ERPs (Tally) with 90s UI that dont need mouse.
No, I mean, like a copilot style AI assistant, the user can chat with to ask what they want to do, and either the assistant can operate and navigate the UI to the right place, or perhaps even shortcut the steps for the user by asking for questions to satisfy inputs for the thing they are trying to accomplish.
An example:
- user intent is to update an attribute for a component part number A21445
- user can click a chat bubble icon in lower right and chat to the assistant
- user describes their intent - "help me update the description for part number A21445
- system replies by informing the user it will open the right screen, opening a part/component editing UI, with the right part loaded, with the cursor positioned in the description field, and the assistant stays open for further assistance; or;
- system replies that it found the part and can update the description, shows the current description for the user, asks "what description do you want?"
- user enters updated description
- system confirms the change is correct
- user confirms the change is correct
- part/component description is updated without even opening the UI
FWIW, it's great that you have cmd-K and also I've seen those kind of search boxes get more smarts like being able to type "part:A21445" to go directly to a specific UI.
I just suggested the above as we learned some interesting user experiences became possible when our AI assistant had the ability to control our UI directly on behalf of a specific user.
An example in the app I worked in (a web based data pipeline tool):
- "Hey assistant, can you help me add some SQL transformation logic to dataflow ABC, to process the customer data?"
- system uses metadata and knowledge of the UI to open the right dataflow, select the right type of UI to open to enable the user to add a SQL query in the right place, maybe even autogenerate the initial SQL query - this all from the main home page of the app, from a side panel chat assistant.
- net result feels like talking to the assistant to operate the app, almost no clicks required.
the trouble is that there are 1000s of possible mutations -- and the quality of an agent tends to diminsh with the amount of "tools" you give it. i need to figure out the right abstraction for this.
I pray you focus on your core product and don’t fall into an agentification rabbit hole.
If you do want everything to be automatable take a page from Blender and give every action a key binding plus a Python method, so Python scripts can take the same actions a human would, but as function calls instead of clicks. Then maybe maybe maybe you can have a text field that allows natural language to transform to an action, but please god stay away from chat interfaces.
Rhino CAD is another interesting interface to look at, there’s a million buttons and menus but there’s also a text field at the top of the viewport where you can just type a command if you already know the name instead of rummaging through submenus. Kind of a CLI within the GUI.
I'll bite. I am a ERP consultant in the SMB manufacturing and distribution space. Primarily we operate on Acumatica, Sage and Netsuite.
The most important thing about ERP systems is - customization. IE: Scripting (netsuite), or even core programming (Sage100 for example). Not just user defined fields but workflows and being able to override and hook into core parts of the system. Say you want to override your cost basis for a certain productline or maybe serve different prices based on the shipping warehouse.
How do you approach that?
EDIT:
How do you handle the finances, G/L auditing, and allt hat financial wizardy?
customers.. they love PDFs. How do you handle generating things like pick lists, invoice sheets, etc? templating?
EDIT2:
One thing big ERPs provide is basically a cohesive way to extend. Not just an API in a RESTFUL sense, it's more akin to an IDE or like GTK+, there's almost everything rolled in for extension inside the 'world view' of the ERP. Every ERP makes some decisions and the rest of the world may flow, be that how you issue credit memos, handle multiple financial entities (do they all have the same chart of accounts? do they all have the same modules? Are there shared users) and so forth. How do you approach that? IE: when you need to slap something like PO's on top of AP, so basically AP + Items and a whole bunch more, does that "flow"? Do you receive those goods and they end up in your inventory for AR? etc.... Having an extensible system is great for addons and consulting, but the bigger piece is - for you, letting your ERP grow and add capabilities.
EDIT3: "Stripe" is not a billing techstack. Mostly CFOs make decisions about billing options, not us lowly tech monkies. Do you support pluggable vaults or anything akin?
these are all excellent questions! i think, interestingly, the answer to all of them is basically -- there's an off the shelf version that's opinionated and good. and if you want to take it a step further, you'd want to just modify the source code.
i think open-source gives consultatnts and integrators super powers that they may not be used to -- everything currently has to be done through abstractions on abstractions. if you can just modify the source code, it becomes a little simpler i think.
I currently work in an ERP adjacent industry serving M&D. I don’t think this is as beneficial as you think it is.
Your value prop lands really well with the Software Architect in me. That part of my skill set loves the idea of creativity, flexibility, etc.
The Director in me does not want that. That sounds like a money pit, never done, management nightmare. What kind of dev do I hire? Do I need a Product Manager for that? How long will it take? Sounds too hard to get a win as a senior leader.
Most of the software in the adjacent space (and ERPs) have “prescriptions” or an ecosystem to get customizations done. Code may get deployed in a special assembly, a special SDK exists, etc
A prescriptive way to get the job done is much more preferred for predictability, even if it is not as loved by the developers.
I think Carbon is a neat and ambitious offering - happy to chat more with you if desired.
At the ERP level everything is abstracted such that every operation is just a black box - stuff (raw materials, subcomponents, labor) goes in, stuff (assemblies, finished goods, scrap) comes out.
the way i see it, the sales side should be bespoke -- because everyone has a different product, and way of selling/configuring, and the factory-floor side should be bespoke -- because of all the different types of equipment. but the middle layer (purchasing, bill of materials, invoices, sales orders, scheduling, processes, work centers) can be standardized.
for me that's why it's important that the middle layer is open source. so that the bespoke layers can tie into it.
ahh, it does -- but there's a slight hair to split.
on sales, carbon supports quoting, sales orders, invoicing, configurator, etc -- but it does not attempt to create a website for you where you can list your products and their configurations. the idea is that you have a site, the site sends info to carbon through the API (whether it's a quote or an order), and then things begin from there.
similarly with production except that the shop floor is pulling intstead of pushing. carbon manages the schedule, the jobs, the capacity planning, etc. and provides a UI for guys on the shop floor to record their time and materials. but if you want to interface with a machine, you'd be pulling information out of carbon through the API, and relaying it to the machine.
right now, we're just targeting small-medium manufacturers. there are two types -- one for job shops, and one for assembly type work. we're trying to target both.
imo though, it's fairly straightforward to go from a manufacturing ERP to a non-manufacturing ERP -- but it's very difficult to do the opposite because of the complexity of manufacturing.
ERPs supporting complex asset maintenance (eg mineral processing plants in the middle of nowhere) have a different flavour of complexity, although you could argue they are EAMs.
Mincom, a Brisbane based tech company started in the late 80s with a suite for mining, and oil/gas production. At the time, they had 1-10 customers who paid a LOT of money. I am sure they are bigger now, but the fundamentals here are the same: you have to maintain almost every version of product back to the origin, and backport any change, because you can guarantee there is a mine in Kazakstan making a very large amount of profit, which is unwilling to upgrade, but is willing to pay you to maintain the legacy codebase.
TL;DR -If you support mining, expect to support the FORTRAN code you shipped them in 1960s.
First off, congrats, this is no small feat, well done.
A question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here?
And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (including my own!), and that is that software designed for one single hoster is often more complex to deploy and built in a different way, whereas software designed primarily to self-host looks much simpler. As an example, installing Wordpress or Odoo is relatively simple, with basic frontend webserver config and easy to run open source databases. Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy. What's the strategy here? Despite having the skills for it, I'm not sure I'd ever consider self-hosting Carbon, and maybe that's good for Carbon as a business, but it's also less good for the ecosystem.
> Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy
Perhaps this could be addressed by providing a Pulumi or Terraform program?
It's not just about the initial deployment, although these may help. If you're running Wordpress, the question "why is it slow" is pretty limited in scope – you need a faster webserver, database, or maybe need those two to be closer to each other. A simplification but not much of one. For this, is it the app server, the task queue, or one of several other components, or is it in the Supabase layer, or is it a dependency that someone else runs... etc.
Figuring out issues get more complex, scaling gets more complex, backup and recovery get more complex, now you need monitoring for it all too, and with many services the complexity multiplies.
All of that complexity is somewhat justified for a team that exists to build and operate the system (i.e. SaaS), but doesn't really work for a team who exist to build something else and have just been tasked with operating this.
I think we can simplify this over time. Everything in our stack is MIT/Apache. I'm keeping my eye on this fastabase project from Drizzle: https://github.com/drizzle-team/fastabase/tree/main
Is this a kind of developer BINGO? ;-)
"Techstack Remix – framework Typescript – language Tailwind – styling Radix UI - behavior Supabase - database Supabase – auth Upstash - cache Trigger - jobs Resend – email Novu – notifications Vercel – hosting Stripe - billing"
And no joke: congrats to your product!
I’m the owner of a smallish furniture manufacturer. About 15 employees. I built out the order management system myself because nothing really fit our process.
After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.
yeah, good point. the docs could definitely use some work. check this out if you're interested. it's not complete, but it goes through the software pretty well: https://learn.carbon.ms
i don't know if you build anything custom, but we do have a configurator
What exactly is an “ERP”? Virtually everything I read about them or on the website of products, is so vague and broad that it sounds like “it’s everything”. How would a business know they need this product? For the big ERPs out there, is there a clear guide with screenshots that show what they concretely do?
Basically the core functionality is to track inventory, manage purchase orders in, and sales orders out. Generally that's also linked to accounting so basically as you buy and sell stuff everything is linked to your accounting ledgers.
Then there's MRP (M for manufacturing) which is usually an option - for when stuff that you're selling isn't the same as what you're buying.
So the ERP/MRP manages bills of materials for items (basically parts lists), when you want to sell something you make a sales order, it sees if you have the inventory on hand to actually make the things, and if not you can generate purchase orders, and then once you have everything it can create work orders which basically tell your factory people to go and turn the input parts into a product so you can sell it. Invoices are created from sales orders, and workers time is tracked on the purchase order, so the cost of goods and labour is automatically tracked in your financial reports as well as the revenue etc.
The M is for “material”. Material Resource Planning.
It's a type of software that lets business manage and automate core processes in one integrated system. Typically linking finance/accounting with operations like sales, inventory and manufacturing.
I've worked on a erp for a short while and I genuinely still don't know. The amount of bullshit surrounding them is certainly staggering.
I now work on a large company that is about to introduce a large new erp system and is not only investing billions into that change with the mother of all vendor lock ins; but we're also internally transforming the company so that the erp will work. But no, we can't afford the two days of estimated work to upgrade to c++20 as it's not necessary right now.
> internally transforming the company
I'm not sure how things are now, but I once worked tangentially on a mid-sized corporation ERP rollout. At that time it was not unusual to have an entire department at the ERP-adopting company called "Change Management." Any company-wide process change was managed by the Change Management department.
Oh that brings memories! Been in quite a few of those.
Basically the ERP vendor sells you the software and estimates that you need a couple months and a couple consultants for the migration and integration, plus a few users of your product as guinea pigs. It is expensive as heck but well, at least it is only two months (plus hotels, plane and food).
After two months you’re halfway done according to the vendor but you need some extra helping hands for the harder features, so you get more consultants, and a department to handle change. You get a few posters.
After a couple years you have eight consultants and a consulting product manager still doing the migration work, plus eight more freelancing ERP experts, and about four engineers from your own team working full time on apis. The work is halfway done, though! Your non-tech staff is juggling between two products and dissenting voices start to appear. You make and distribute t-shirts with texts like “Project Evolution” or “Project Future” to ensure everyone is on board.
After two more years you are almost halfway there, but staff turnover guarantees that people don’t remember the productivity of yore, and the new ERP is judged as good enough. People have gotten used to it, the jokes aren’t as vicious as before, and only a handful of people were fired in the previous years due to the company going severely over budget. But hey nobody gets fired for buying IBM so the boss who decided to blow 15 million on it is fine.
Do you have any users yet? What’s your target size manufacturing company? I’ve been in the industrial software space for a while, and at least for large MFG, you only see the major players, with SAP being the most common. There is this “UNS” concept that’s been around for 5ish years now and has caught steam (unified namespace, google and you’ll find it). It has holes from a technical standpoint, but it will get attention if you can show how it works with factory data in a UNS. Happy to help if i can. I work at a company that does industrial dataops now, focused on getting shop floor data in/out of the factory with context.
Hey I'd love to learn more about your thoughts. We have a discord if you'd like to join.
I see the market like this: - small job shops and startups are using it now (we have 5 customers today using it to run operations) - mid-market manufacturers with 200-ish employees are where i'd like to go, but many want all the accounting baked in and that's still a WIP - large players have to use SAP for accounting because they have multiple-ledgers, but i see this as a good "custom MES starting point"
TLDR Brad: I’d suggest you look at any customers with potential scale, who should have a custom SKU/BOM/order mix. 3D printing and full custom made to order products will have this mix, and it gets increasing painful when scaling past 100s of orders per month. One will find there will be in-house systems and workaround to deal with this complication, which should be fixed decently once a company is in the 1000s of orders per month by necessity of survival.
A bit more background as there is various bits of advice in these threads, and I will provide my take with scaling such a startup. Third-Party ERPs from the big vendors are purchased by Finance and are needed for validation pre-IPO and into the IPO (no one is going to trust something else without proof of success in publicly traded companies and it will be a red flag if there is no use cases in reputable publicly traded companies). ERPs are financial focused (like EHRs in healthcare), and their vendors will happily upsell the other addons like MES/BOMs, which are fine for generic manufacturing with limited SKUs. However in a world of customized/personalized SKUs, traditional ERP/finances solutions cannot be easily used to run manufacturing operations. I’d recommend focusing on integrating into ERPs (tack on custom IDs to the related objects) and automating them rather than building the full financial accounting/taxes into the platform. For example, your platform will still track the BOM details, but the totals will get synced for overall financial reporting for the various ledgers and not all the sub-assemblies which the ledgers don’t care about. This keeps the MES purpose built (and the big vendor ERP keeping simple books) and the ultimate source of truth what’s happening on the floor without getting into the accounting details that matter for tax optimization and not manufacturing operations.
really well said, imo! it's interesting how there's two views of ERP. one is a G/L + anything needed to support it. and the other is more of a tool that supports operations and planning. i started with a G/L, but have kept it hidden even now, because my thought it that everything else should be good first, and support the G/L second.
Gotta have your G/L tied to your whole system. How else can you do project billing or Make-To-order quoting and have it roll your Cogs and such over to the G/L....
We built a lot of the custom ERP related systems outside of our ERP. Leaving the financials to the big boys and just talk to the ERP. It's working really well.
We recently replaced Oracle financials for two of our customers-mid size manufacturers doing around $10B/yr in revs. We’re pretty small so grateful they trust us with that level of work.
agree. it's very impressive how SAP maintains multiple ledgers for different regulations in different countries. i'm not going to replace that any time soon. i think even tesla uses SAP for accounting, but something like this for the rest.
Is there a reason for such an arrangement? Why would Tesla not use SAP as their backbone ERP too?
Customising SAP is like setting money on fire but the core of it is rock solid.
Does the ERP allow you API access, or do you need to do CSV upload/download?
we give people access to the same supabase API as us, but it's scoped to their company with RLS. the docs are autogenerated: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1873043714454811100
you can use the API from inside the codebase, or outside of it: https://github.com/crbnos/carbon?tab=readme-ov-file#api
API and direct database access.
Congrats on the launch! Love seeing modern manufacturing systems.
Do you handle supplier master data management? We're seeing procurement teams struggle with duplicate vendors in their ERPs - same supplier gets entered 5 different ways, messes up spend analytics and supplier relationships.
We're building AI agents for business data cleanup (still in stealth, docs coming). Manufacturing/supply chain customers seem to have the messiest supplier data - way worse than other industries.
Curious if this is something you're thinking about for Carbon? (CTO here, happy to chat)
for the supplier problem, we just use a typeahead/combobox component.
but for raw materials, we auto-generate the ids like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1947682873416221184
also working on some agents: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586
would love to talk, i'm brad@carbon.ms
Nice! Yeah, a typeahead works to a degree. I imagine that's searching their own instance vs calling out to a standardized DB you manage?
Raw materials is definitely a different animal, so auto-generating definitely works. I know a company where that's all they do - they manually pour over supplier specs to get all the model names.
Agent approach looks super cool. I see the supplier search piece happening there.
We've mapped out ~265M+ businesses globally. We're thinking about this as a data infra angle where products can tap into our system to access all the world's businesses. We're getting requests for processing millions of ERP records to clean/standardize, plus semantic supplier search across our full dataset.
I'll shoot you an email to chat more.
thanks! look forward to talking to you
This is interesting but what about non standard items? There are plenty of cases where the raw material might theoretically have the same name, but was made with a different process by each manufacturer or the resulting item from different manufacturers has slightly diverged for various reasons.
for that we use "batch" tracking with batch properties
this is a big issue in healthcare, a chunk of my last company's revenue was doing MDM for large medtechs.
Interesting. Was that a MDM focused product for healthcare or something more general infra wise like Informatica?
I don't have much context in the healthcare space and the challenges that exist there. We've been mainly talking to people in fintech, supply chain, and sales & marketing, which is primarily where I ran into this at past roles.
This is all cool but i think traditional erp systems are going to get eaten away by software like Optifye.ai, using vision for counting, and then certifying through manual data entry. If there’s no Vision integrated into your erp, you’ll get eaten away by competitors who run faster lean teams through using such systesm
I am setting up a large manufacturing operation now.
Red flags with your site are: (a) seems to assume a sales order based process; (b) seems to assume B2C sales via Stripe; (c) has a huge bunch of layers but no actual user view.
I would suggest beginning your page with "Assumptions". In there, list all the things you have assumed.
Then I would suggest having a section for each area: ERP, MES, whatever, with a screenshot or two and a quick table based comparison vs. other tools.
Finally, include something about the layers you used and what they do. Nobody really cares about that stuff, it's almost developer documentation rather than user documentation.
Congrats on this! Quite interesting for me as I have been working on vertical ERPs for a while, not at all related to manufacturing and as far as I know, accounting is usually the core of any ERP. Who is your ICP at companies in your target groups - ops managers? I’ve mostly seen CFOs being the drivers behind ERP purchasing.
How's it compare with Apache OFBiz and the things people are building on top of that?
Wow how have I never heard of OFBiz? I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good self hosted erp forever and thought ERPnext was as good as it gets but this sounds super.
The modular ERP/MES/QMS approach is interesting and challenges traditional manufacturing processes. Most manufacturers obsess over single source of truth. (I.e. ensuring a part number means exactly the same thing across planning, production, and quality systems.) On the one hand, breaking these into separate apps creates potential data consistency risks. On the other hand, it could enable much better adoption. Start with MES for shop floor visibility then add QMS for compliance later rather than massive all-in-one ERP implementations that often fail. Curious, how are you handling data consistency across modules? What's been the feedback from your current or potential customers on this approach versus traditional monolithic ERP systems?
hey founder here. they are separate apps, but use the same database, and same api. i'm also a big believer in single-source-of-truth and the compound startup idea
Ah gotcha. Makes sense to get the benefits of modular adoption without the headaches. Nice approach.
For me this is a space that has been long dominated by MRPeasy--it's just such a perfect fit. Happy to see open source solutions slowly catching up.
How does this compare with the manufacturing capabilities in ERPNext?
i don't know a ton about ERPNext's manufacturing capabilities, but i think there are really great for these reasons:
- free to try - open source - well-documented - great developer community
one big difference is in the data model. in ERPNext, everything is a doctype, and there's some standard hooks.
in carbon, there are hundreds of different tables. each ui is it's own set of react components, so it's a lot more manufacturing-specific and a little more opinionated.
Hm, interesting. With how slow the testimonial carousel on the web page is though, I don't have much confidence that Carbon is performant either. How many pieces of that (frankly massive) techstack require dedicated network trips?
As a UX person, this is the type of stuff I love to see posted here. So many people don't understand how atrocious the UX is in non-sexy career tracks such as manufacturing. One question I have is how users have reacted to your leftmost nav bar. 13 icons is a lot, do you show them all at one time, or do they dynamically appear based on the user role of the person who's logged in at the time?
man! i wish i knew how to do a better job with that. there's just so much stuff. do you have any ideas?
Give users an AI assistant they can ask to navigate them to the right screen or section of the application?
In a previous job, we built our AI assistant so that it could operate our UI in the front-end and it was very powerful.
like a cmd+k type deal or something different? we do have cmd+k navigation to everywhere currently + global search, but i worry that less sophisticated users might not use it.
Please share the feedback for keyboard shortcuts from real users. Now shops in India tend to use touchscreens or have staff fiddle with laptops with tiny touchpads, but lots of shops use ERPs (Tally) with 90s UI that dont need mouse.
No, I mean, like a copilot style AI assistant, the user can chat with to ask what they want to do, and either the assistant can operate and navigate the UI to the right place, or perhaps even shortcut the steps for the user by asking for questions to satisfy inputs for the thing they are trying to accomplish.
An example: - user intent is to update an attribute for a component part number A21445
- user can click a chat bubble icon in lower right and chat to the assistant
- user describes their intent - "help me update the description for part number A21445
- system replies by informing the user it will open the right screen, opening a part/component editing UI, with the right part loaded, with the cursor positioned in the description field, and the assistant stays open for further assistance; or;
- system replies that it found the part and can update the description, shows the current description for the user, asks "what description do you want?"
- user enters updated description
- system confirms the change is correct
- user confirms the change is correct
- part/component description is updated without even opening the UI
FWIW, it's great that you have cmd-K and also I've seen those kind of search boxes get more smarts like being able to type "part:A21445" to go directly to a specific UI.
I just suggested the above as we learned some interesting user experiences became possible when our AI assistant had the ability to control our UI directly on behalf of a specific user.
An example in the app I worked in (a web based data pipeline tool):
- "Hey assistant, can you help me add some SQL transformation logic to dataflow ABC, to process the customer data?"
- system uses metadata and knowledge of the UI to open the right dataflow, select the right type of UI to open to enable the user to add a SQL query in the right place, maybe even autogenerate the initial SQL query - this all from the main home page of the app, from a side panel chat assistant.
- net result feels like talking to the assistant to operate the app, almost no clicks required.
I hope that makes sense.
really appreciate you taking the time to write this!
we've started trying to work through adding agents like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586
the trouble is that there are 1000s of possible mutations -- and the quality of an agent tends to diminsh with the amount of "tools" you give it. i need to figure out the right abstraction for this.
I pray you focus on your core product and don’t fall into an agentification rabbit hole.
If you do want everything to be automatable take a page from Blender and give every action a key binding plus a Python method, so Python scripts can take the same actions a human would, but as function calls instead of clicks. Then maybe maybe maybe you can have a text field that allows natural language to transform to an action, but please god stay away from chat interfaces.
Rhino CAD is another interesting interface to look at, there’s a million buttons and menus but there’s also a text field at the top of the viewport where you can just type a command if you already know the name instead of rummaging through submenus. Kind of a CLI within the GUI.
I'll bite. I am a ERP consultant in the SMB manufacturing and distribution space. Primarily we operate on Acumatica, Sage and Netsuite.
The most important thing about ERP systems is - customization. IE: Scripting (netsuite), or even core programming (Sage100 for example). Not just user defined fields but workflows and being able to override and hook into core parts of the system. Say you want to override your cost basis for a certain productline or maybe serve different prices based on the shipping warehouse.
How do you approach that?
EDIT:
How do you handle the finances, G/L auditing, and allt hat financial wizardy?
customers.. they love PDFs. How do you handle generating things like pick lists, invoice sheets, etc? templating?
EDIT2:
One thing big ERPs provide is basically a cohesive way to extend. Not just an API in a RESTFUL sense, it's more akin to an IDE or like GTK+, there's almost everything rolled in for extension inside the 'world view' of the ERP. Every ERP makes some decisions and the rest of the world may flow, be that how you issue credit memos, handle multiple financial entities (do they all have the same chart of accounts? do they all have the same modules? Are there shared users) and so forth. How do you approach that? IE: when you need to slap something like PO's on top of AP, so basically AP + Items and a whole bunch more, does that "flow"? Do you receive those goods and they end up in your inventory for AR? etc.... Having an extensible system is great for addons and consulting, but the bigger piece is - for you, letting your ERP grow and add capabilities.
EDIT3: "Stripe" is not a billing techstack. Mostly CFOs make decisions about billing options, not us lowly tech monkies. Do you support pluggable vaults or anything akin?
these are all excellent questions! i think, interestingly, the answer to all of them is basically -- there's an off the shelf version that's opinionated and good. and if you want to take it a step further, you'd want to just modify the source code.
i think open-source gives consultatnts and integrators super powers that they may not be used to -- everything currently has to be done through abstractions on abstractions. if you can just modify the source code, it becomes a little simpler i think.
take the PDFs for example. just make them how you want them in your instance of the software using the most popular tools on the planet (i don't mean crystal reports): https://github.com/crbnos/carbon/tree/main/packages/document...
I currently work in an ERP adjacent industry serving M&D. I don’t think this is as beneficial as you think it is.
Your value prop lands really well with the Software Architect in me. That part of my skill set loves the idea of creativity, flexibility, etc.
The Director in me does not want that. That sounds like a money pit, never done, management nightmare. What kind of dev do I hire? Do I need a Product Manager for that? How long will it take? Sounds too hard to get a win as a senior leader.
Most of the software in the adjacent space (and ERPs) have “prescriptions” or an ecosystem to get customizations done. Code may get deployed in a special assembly, a special SDK exists, etc
A prescriptive way to get the job done is much more preferred for predictability, even if it is not as loved by the developers.
I think Carbon is a neat and ambitious offering - happy to chat more with you if desired.
i should also say that the accounting is a WIP but modeled on Dynamics 365 - with posting groups, item ledgers, cost ledgers, and general ledgers.
A stupid question from a layman: is it really how people do it?
I would have thought "manufacturing" was too generic and that you would need different software for each industry and so on.
But instead it looks like it doesn't matter if you're making shoes or cars or umbrellas or computer chips, everything uses the same software?
At the ERP level everything is abstracted such that every operation is just a black box - stuff (raw materials, subcomponents, labor) goes in, stuff (assemblies, finished goods, scrap) comes out.
founder here. great question.
the way i see it, the sales side should be bespoke -- because everyone has a different product, and way of selling/configuring, and the factory-floor side should be bespoke -- because of all the different types of equipment. but the middle layer (purchasing, bill of materials, invoices, sales orders, scheduling, processes, work centers) can be standardized.
for me that's why it's important that the middle layer is open source. so that the bespoke layers can tie into it.
I see, I was under the impression that Carbon encompassed sales and factory floor too. Now it makes more sense. Thanks!
ahh, it does -- but there's a slight hair to split.
on sales, carbon supports quoting, sales orders, invoicing, configurator, etc -- but it does not attempt to create a website for you where you can list your products and their configurations. the idea is that you have a site, the site sends info to carbon through the API (whether it's a quote or an order), and then things begin from there.
similarly with production except that the shop floor is pulling intstead of pushing. carbon manages the schedule, the jobs, the capacity planning, etc. and provides a UI for guys on the shop floor to record their time and materials. but if you want to interface with a machine, you'd be pulling information out of carbon through the API, and relaying it to the machine.
Great Q&A's, thank you for taking the time to answer! Sounds like a great way to handle the complexities of business reality.
What vertical ERPs does it replace?
right now, we're just targeting small-medium manufacturers. there are two types -- one for job shops, and one for assembly type work. we're trying to target both.
imo though, it's fairly straightforward to go from a manufacturing ERP to a non-manufacturing ERP -- but it's very difficult to do the opposite because of the complexity of manufacturing.
ERPs supporting complex asset maintenance (eg mineral processing plants in the middle of nowhere) have a different flavour of complexity, although you could argue they are EAMs.
Mincom, a Brisbane based tech company started in the late 80s with a suite for mining, and oil/gas production. At the time, they had 1-10 customers who paid a LOT of money. I am sure they are bigger now, but the fundamentals here are the same: you have to maintain almost every version of product back to the origin, and backport any change, because you can guarantee there is a mine in Kazakstan making a very large amount of profit, which is unwilling to upgrade, but is willing to pay you to maintain the legacy codebase.
TL;DR -If you support mining, expect to support the FORTRAN code you shipped them in 1960s.
Great UI! Congrats on the launch