The client
Zeta Industry is the company behind Austra ERP: it owns the product and sells it to manufacturers. Mitigate was the development partner, responsible for the design and the engineering of the platform. The brief was ambitious: a system for the full business cycle of a manufacturing company, not another tool for one department.
The challenge
Industrial companies in the region had no specialised, full-fledged business management system that could be implemented quickly. The two usual options both had a cost.
The large standard platforms (SAP, Oracle, Dynamics) are proven on the international market, but they require a high investment in licences, extra spending to adapt them to a manufacturer's processes, and they carry a lot of functionality that a particular company will never use.
Assembling a digital infrastructure from several SaaS tools (Salesforce, Scoro, Asana and the like) is fast and cheaper, and any tool can be swapped out. The limits are customisation and integration: a company rarely gets the full benefit of digitising its processes, and its business-critical infrastructure depends on each vendor's roadmap and support.
The goal was a platform that combines the advantages of both approaches and solves their disadvantages.
What Mitigate built
A fully web-based platform made of functional modules that are assembled according to the business: sales and estimation, order management, distributor management, production planning, procurement, logistics, document management and quality management.
Three decisions shaped the system:
- Web-based from the start. Employees perform and control a large part of the process remotely, with nothing to install.
- Partners inside the infrastructure. Distributors, suppliers, subcontractors and customers get access to the part of the process that concerns them, which speeds up the flow of information along the whole value chain.
- No unnecessary functionality. Every user role sees only what it needs, and the system is customised to the company rather than the company to the system.
Technologies
The backend is Ruby on Rails with Node.js services; the user interface is built in React. The web architecture keeps rollout simple for a manufacturer with many locations and partners. The general and technical presentations of the platform are available on the Austra ERP product page.
The result
- A full set of modules, so a company can digitise all of its key business processes in a single infrastructure.
- Remote work for employees and a shared process with vendors, distributors, suppliers, subcontractors and customers.
- Interfaces without unnecessary functionality, customisation to the company's needs, and continuous, tailored user support.
- Full business analytics for management decisions.
Today Austra ERP is a product in its own right. On austra.io Zeta Industry offers it with production planning, product configurator and deliveries modules, connections to CAD and BIM platforms, and a licence model without per-user fees, to furniture, modular housing, metalworking and mechanical engineering companies.