Most companies in your position start by picking a tool instead of picking a problem. That's backwards.

For a 200-person manufacturer running on-prem with a small IT team, there are a few things worth trying that won't eat your budget.

Your ERP data idea is solid. Export demand or sales numbers weekly and look for customers who stopped ordering, parts with weird volume swings, or gaps between forecast and actual. A script that flags anomalies and sends a summary would already be more than most shops have.

If you have maintenance requests or quality tickets, somebody is probably sorting those by hand right now. A lightweight model can tag and route them, and pull up similar past issues. This one tends to save more time than people expect.

Then there's the doc problem. Most manufacturing teams have SOPs and quality docs scattered across ten different folders and two SharePoint sites nobody remembers the URL for. A local search tool that lets people ask "have we seen this before?" saves your ops and maintenance crews from digging.

Most companies in your situation start by picking tools instead of problems.

For a 200 person manufacturer with 2 IT people, I’d keep it simple:

your ERP idea is actually pretty good. just exporting demand weekly and flagging customers or parts that drop off would already be useful. most places don’t even have that visibility.

another easy one is ticket triage. if maintenance or quality issues are getting sorted manually, even basic tagging / grouping helps a lot.

and honestly docs are usually a mess. SOPs spread across folders, sharepoint, etc. just being able to quickly find “have we seen this before” is a bigger win than people expect.

I wouldn’t jump into big systems or hardware yet. just find one thing that saves time consistently.

Most companies in your situation start by picking tools instead of problems.

For a 200 person manufacturer with 2 IT people, I’d keep it simple:

your ERP idea is actually pretty good. just exporting demand weekly and flagging customers or parts that drop off would already be useful. most places don’t even have that visibility.

another easy one is ticket triage. if maintenance or quality issues are getting sorted manually, even basic tagging / grouping helps a lot.

and honestly docs are usually a mess. SOPs spread across folders, sharepoint, etc. just being able to quickly find “have we seen this before” is a bigger win than people expect.

I wouldn’t jump into big systems or hardware yet. just find one thing that saves time consistently.

Most companies in your position start by picking a tool instead of picking a problem. That's backwards.


For a 200-person manufacturer running on-prem with a small IT team, there are a few things worth trying that won't eat your budget.


Your ERP data idea is solid. Export demand or sales numbers weekly and look for customers who stopped ordering, parts with weird volume swings, or gaps between forecast and actual. A script that flags anomalies and sends a summary would already be more than most shops have.


If you have maintenance requests or quality tickets, somebody is probably sorting those by hand right now. A lightweight model can tag and route them, and pull up similar past issues. This one tends to save more time than people expect.


Then there's the doc problem. Most manufacturing teams have SOPs and quality docs scattered across ten different folders and two SharePoint sites nobody remembers the URL for. A local search tool that lets people ask "have we seen this before?" saves your ops and maintenance crews from digging.