Eyebrow: Case study — Manufacturing & Industrial
From Excel payouts to a live, governed platform
How we discovered, built and deployed a six-section production-incentive system for a Satna-based cable manufacturer — and kept it live as new requirements kept surfacing.
A 20-minute call with a co-founder. We usually respond within one hour.
Six operational sections · a five-level approval chain · confirmed live and active across the plants, in writing.
The client
A Satna-based cable manufacturer needed to pay shop-floor workmen accurately for the work they actually did.
Piece-rate incentives on a factory floor are not ordinary payroll. Every production line — cable, capacitor, testing, compound, rubber-mixing — carries its own rules. And every rupee has to be defensible: to the worker, to the department head, and to finance. (Client identity withheld by request; all details anonymised.)
Where they started: a spreadsheet and a DOS-era program
Incentives were worked out by hand in Excel, alongside a legacy DOS application that had aged past the point of trust. No role-based control. No approval trail. No single place to see how a number was reached.
The brief arrived carrying real scepticism built up over earlier software attempts. And the people who had to be satisfied spanned four functions — IT, finance, production and HR — each with reporting expectations that had never been written into a specification.
The real problem wasn’t the code
Part-way through the build, the production and HR teams surfaced requirements no one had captured at the start. The client’s IT champion flagged the gap plainly: the portal wasn’t yet meeting the production team’s expectations and reporting needs.
That is where most factory-software projects quietly fail. The engineering is rarely the hard part. The hard part is turning late, multi-department requirements — arriving from four functions at once — into one system everyone will actually sign off on and use.
What we did: diagnose first, then build in the open
Instead of promising a finished product on day one, we worked the way that de-risks exactly this failure:
- Discovery and a paid blueprint capturing the incentive logic across every line before writing production code.
- A small working core first, put in front of real users, then expanded only where usage proved it was needed.
- A documented change process every new request from any department logged, estimated and signed off, never absorbed silently until the timeline broke.
That change process was the difference. Over seventy separate change requests were raised, actioned and confirmed — not a sign of failure, but the mechanism that turned four departments’ evolving needs into one agreed system.
The system we delivered
- Six operational sections incentive calculation, hours-base entry, capacitor, testing and rubber-mixing among them — each with its own entry, calculation and approval flow, plus overtime as a parallel workflow.
- A five-level approval chain, from shift-floor sign-off up through department and plant heads to HR, so no payout moves without the right eyes on it.
- Role-based dashboards and reports for functional heads (plant head, HR head), scoped to their own machines and departments.
- The everyday plumbing a real factory needs multi-machine mapping, automated reports pushed to department heads, and database backup and restore — so heads get the numbers they need without chasing IT.
- Built on a modern, ownable stack Node.js, React/Next.js and PostgreSQL, with token-based access control and a full audit trail — deployed to the client’s own server.
Contracted late in 2025, built over roughly nine intensive weeks in early 2026, deployed and running across departments by mid-2026.
The result
The platform went live and into active daily use across the manufacturer’s plants, computing incentives for real shop-floor workmen. The client’s IT team confirmed in writing that the requested changes and enhancements had been successfully implemented and the system was live and active. Phase one closed cleanly, on a purchase order, with the relationship and a further project pipeline intact.
What it releases: an estimated ~876 person-days a year
Here is our own conservative estimate of the manual effort this removes — with the arithmetic shown, so you can judge it against your own floor.
Across the platform’s six operational sections, each running every day of the year, at roughly 0.40 of a person-day of repetitive manual calculation removed per section:
6 × 365 × 0.40 ≈ 876 person-days of capacity released a year.
This is an internal estimate based on our own assumptions — work capacity freed for higher-value tasks, not an independently audited figure and not a guaranteed cash saving. We show the basis rather than a rounded headline, precisely so you can pressure-test it.
What we’d tell the next manufacturer
- The requirements you haven’t written down yet are the real project. Get every department — production, HR, finance, IT — into scope before anyone signs a price.
- A documented change process protects both sides: it’s how honest scope growth stays affordable and on record.
- Ship a working core early. Software people can use beats a specification people argue about.
This is the same method behind our custom software and AI systems and strategy and consulting work, and it sits at the centre of how we approach manufacturing and industrial clients.
Questions manufacturers ask us
Was this custom-built, or a product you resell? Custom-built for this manufacturer’s lines and rules, deployed on their own server — they own the system, the data and the logins. Off-the-shelf ERP and HRMS tools rarely carry factory piece-rate logic; this was shaped to it, at a fraction of a full ERP rollout.
What happens when new requirements appear mid-project? They go through the documented change process — logged, estimated and signed off before work starts. That’s how this project absorbed seventy-plus changes without the scope quietly breaking the budget.
How do we know a system will actually go live, not stall? We ship a small working core early and expand only where real usage proves the need. Here, the client confirmed in writing that the system was implemented, live and active across departments.
Have an operational process stuck in spreadsheets?
Tell us where the work is leaking. In a 20-minute call, a co-founder will help you see whether it’s a scoping problem, a software problem, or both — and what a first, small, provable step looks like.
Prefer to type? Message us on WhatsApp. We usually respond within one hour.
Two planning tools to start with: the Manufacturing Digitisation Checklist and the Custom Software Requirements Workbook.
(Approx. 980 words.)