Manufacturing software written by someone who did the job.
A manufacturing execution system for UK engineering SMEs. The shop floor, stores and quality office from £299 a month; the commercial chain through to the VAT return on Professional.
Built by one engineer, eleven years on a UK manufacturing shop floor - building, wiring and testing panels to Class 1, 2 and 3 disciplines for jobs touching rail, defence, aerospace and water treatment. No sales team - you’ll be emailing the person who wrote it.
The gap
Six figures, or a whiteboard.
Enterprise ERP costs six figures, takes a year to implement, and needs a consultant on retainer to change a form. Spreadsheets, a job bag and a whiteboard cost nothing - and quietly stop working somewhere around thirty people.
If you're a 20–200 person engineering firm, there is very little in between. So most shops run a stock system that doesn't know about jobs, a quality folder that doesn't know about either, and a bookkeeper re-typing delivery notes into accounts.
What NEXUS is
One platform where the shop floor, the stores, the quality office and the accounts all read from the same data. The commercial and finance half of that is the Professional plan, marked here and throughout.
- A job knows what it consumed, who ran it and what it cost
- An NCR knows which job, lot and drawing revision it came from
- A delivery note becomes an invoice without anyone re-typing it Professional
- A VAT return is derived from the invoices, not a spreadsheet Professional
- Your old system’s data comes with you - upload its own CSV exports, map the columns once, and dry-run before a single record is written
See it
This is the actual software.
Screens from the running platform, not mockups. The company names in them are fictional demonstration data; everything else on the screen is the product doing the work.
Shop floor
The pick queue, as it is used at the racking.
Five jobs sorted by urgency, one of them a day out and held by an MRP shortage. On a wider screen the job opens beside the queue - bin COMP-B1, part TERM-6MM-GY, pick 26 - one number at a time, on a tablet, with a scanner.
Quality
An AS9102 First Article that refuses to be signed off incomplete.
Three gaps block this First Article: a characteristic ticked Pass with no measured actual, one not dispositioned at all, and a material certificate not verified. The same function that blocks it writes the list you can see - and both sign-offs stay Pending.
Traceability
Every lot on the register, including the one you cannot use.
Five lots on the register, and the count above them says one is in quarantine. The full row names it - L2026-118, a pump housing casting, On Hold and QA Rejected, so no job can consume it. A demo where everything is green proves nothing.
What it does
The whole job, not one slice of it.
Every module below is built and working today. They share one database, so nothing needs reconciling between them. Anything marked Professional is not included in the £299 Starter plan.
Shop floor
- Work orders and operator view
- Kiosk mode and barcode scanning
- Labour booking, OEE and downtime reasons
- Step-by-step work instructions
- Shift handover and downtime analysis Professional
Planning
- Finite capacity scheduling
- MRP netting and shortage alerts
- Multi-level BOMs with revisions
- Routings with setup/run split
- Estimating and quote build-up Professional
Quality
- NCR, CAPA and supplier SCAR
- AS9102 First Article Inspection
- Lot and serial traceability
- Goods-in inspection and quarantine
- Change control (ECR/ECO)
Commercial
- Purchasing, GRN and supplier scorecards
- Customer portal for order visibility
- CRM pipeline and quoting Professional
- Sales orders and fulfilment Professional
- Supplier portal for acknowledgements and ASNs Professional
Finance Professional
- Invoicing per delivery, credit notes
- Job costing: material, labour, overhead
- VAT returns derived from the invoices
- Bank reconciliation and aged debtors
- Xero integration
Records
- Drawing vault with revision history
- Document control and PDF generation
- Maintenance and asset register
- Audit trail on the money path, accounts and quality records Professional
- CSV import with column mapping - customers, suppliers, stock, BOMs and your open order book
Built here, for here
It already knows the questions your customers ask.
Because it was written in your supply chain
Rail, defence and aerospace customers audit their suppliers. The things they ask for are in the product, not on a roadmap:
- AS9102 First Article with characteristic accountability
- Forward and backward lot traceability from a single serial
- Drawing revision bound to the job that used it
- Audit rows on the money path that name the person, not "system"
And it speaks UK
- VAT returns in the nine boxes, derived from the ledger
- Net 30 terms, aged debt from the due date
- Sterling is the base currency; an invoice can be raised in another and converts back to GBP for aged debt and the VAT boxes, at the rates you enter - a currency you have set no rate for is counted at face value, not guessed at
- Xero for the books, live and proven end to end Professional
- UK GDPR and DPA 2018; data held in the EEA
Pricing
Per site, per month. No implementation fee.
You get your own instance and your own database - not a row in a shared one. Every group in the module grid above that needs the Professional plan is marked there, so you can see the line before you talk to me rather than after.
Starter
Get your shop floor digital.
Up to 10 users · 10 machines
- Work Order Management
- Production Tracking & OEE
- Quality Control (NCRs)
- Inventory & BOM Management
- Equipment Monitoring
- Maintenance Scheduling
- Analytics & KPI Scorecard
- Drawing Vault & Change Control
- Email Support
Professional
Most completeThe full platform, for a shop floor that runs on it.
Up to 30 users · 30 machines
- Everything in Starter
- Finance, VAT returns and bank reconciliation
- Sales, CRM, quoting and shipping
- Xero Accounting Integration
- AI Manufacturing Assistant
- Shift Management
- Supplier Portal
- Audit Logs
- SCADA Alarm Integration - real alarms raise tickets and downtime
- SAP Connector (requires the pyrfc driver)
- Priority Email & Chat Support
These are the full prices - NEXUS is not VAT registered, so there is no VAT to add. Pilot terms are negotiable - talk to me.
Where it honestly is
You would be the first.
NEXUS is a working platform, not a prototype - but it has no customers yet. I would rather you heard that from me than found it out. Here is the straight version.
What that costs you
- No reference customer to phone
- Some workflows have only ever been run by me
- Support is one person, not a rota
What it buys you
- Pilot pricing, and terms that reflect the risk
- Direct access to the person who wrote every line
- Your requirements shape what gets built next
- Changes in days, not a change-request queue
What's real, precisely
- Every module listed above is built and tested
- Xero is live and proven end to end
- The SAP connector needs a licensed driver
- PLC alarms are real; live tag reads are simulated
How it's kept honest
- 2,100+ automated tests run on every change
- Money paths checked against hand-worked ledgers
- No feature is sold that the software doesn't do
Data & security
Your data, in one place, in the EEA.
Single tenant
Your own application instance and your own database. Nothing of yours shares a table with another company's.
Held in the EEA
Application hosted in Frankfurt, database in Ireland. UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply. Backups are a snapshot a day, not point-in-time.
Access control
Role-based permissions, and two-factor authentication each user can switch on - it is offered, not enforced. Audit rows cover the money path, the account lifecycle and quality records rather than every screen.
SAML single sign-on is built and proven against Google Workspace, but it is on neither plan above - ask me and we'll agree terms. No ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials certification yet - I'll tell you that before you ask, and I'm happy to complete your supplier security questionnaire in full. A vulnerability disclosure policy is published.
Worth a conversation?
Tell me what your shop makes and where the paperwork hurts. If NEXUS isn't right for you, I'll say so.
karl@nexusmes.co.uk