Built for people who make things.

Where it comes from

Gydon is built and run in the UK by Online Marketing Surgery. It started as a CRM for our own work, and it grew the operational half because the businesses we were closest to kept running into the same wall: the sales system knew about the order and knew nothing at all about the job.

That is still the thing it does that most alternatives do not. Plenty of systems will handle a bill of materials and call it manufacturing. Far fewer know that the work has a sequence, that the sequence needs machines and people, and that both of those are already busy.

What we decided, and why

The routing is not part of the bill of materials

Our first attempt made labour a line on the parts list. It was simpler, and it was wrong: it could not express a work centre, so it could not answer the question two jobs both wanting the same saw on Tuesday. We pulled it apart and did it properly. Every serious manufacturing system separates these two things, and now we know why.

A production step is an ordinary task

We could have built a parallel world of operations, with their own screens, their own time recording and their own reporting. Instead a stage on a job is a task like any other, so it arrives with an estimate, an owner, a clock and a place in the workload without any of those being invented again. It also means shop floor hours and office hours are the same kind of record, which is what lets you ask what a job really cost.

The money has to be exact

Costing is done in exact decimal arithmetic rather than ordinary floating point numbers. We changed this after watching two products move by a penny depending on nothing more than the order a loop ran in. A costing engine that is nearly right is worse than no costing engine, because you will not know which figures to distrust.

Nobody types a password on the shop floor

A password typed on a screen in a workshop is a password the room has seen. So devices are authorised once with a code from the office, and people identify themselves with a PIN or a card. It also fixed something subtler: every hour, every pick and every delivery is recorded against the person who did it rather than the administrator who set the tablet up.

A screen belongs where its records live

The task list is not filed under Manufacturing, even though production stages were the most interesting tasks in the system the week we built them. Filing everybody's work under one department's heading tells everybody else that their work belongs to somebody else. Small decision, and we got it wrong three times before we got it right.

Drag and drop has to earn its place

We built a production board where you dragged jobs between status columns, then deleted it. Setting a status is one click from a dropdown, and a dropdown works better on a tablet with gloves on. Where we did keep dragging is planning, because moving a stage from Tuesday to Thursday is genuinely a movement in space. The reason is written into the code so nobody rebuilds the board in two years' time.

How we work with you

We are a small team, which cuts both ways and we would rather be straight about it. You will talk to people who know the software rather than to a call centre, and a sensible feature request can actually get built. What we cannot do is pretend to be a hundred person vendor with a global support rota.

If Gydon is the wrong fit for you, we will say so on the demo rather than three months into an implementation. That is not modesty, it is self interest: an unhappy customer costs far more than a deal we did not win.