I had always wanted our company to have a software solution for tracking our cheese batches from start to finish, so we could collect data and analyze them more effectively than with the paper make sheets that we were using.
The system also needed to allow us to fulfill our third-party QA requirements, ie tracing all our ingredients used through our production process and to be able to track which customers bought them. There are of course off-the-shelf ERP products for this, but they are both very expensive for a company our size, and because they need to be one size fits all, they are more awkward than they need to be. In early 2023 I started working on a REI3 app to see if I could accomplish it more effectively.
I cannot believe how successful both the development and the app itself have been. I did all of the simple work myself (with no programming background), and with the help of Gabriel from the Lean Softworks team, have been able to implement our more advanced requirements.
Our app is essentially a custom ERP solution made to fit exactly how our small company makes cheese, and at a significant cost savings compared to even an off-the-shelf SAS model in the short term. The direct cost to develop the entire app was less than a year`s subscription to the most suitable ERP solution I found. It has custom features we could never dream of finding in a one size fits all product, like the ability to graph our PH measurements and temperatures over times, or to track the times and duration that our cheeses are in brine or the time between when they are turned.
I could not be more impressed with REI3, the technical ability of the Lean Softwork`s team, and especially the flexibility and collaborative approach they brought to helping us develop our app. I am already looking forward to adding even more features to our first REI3 app and considering starting on a second.