AI Automation for Manufacturing
Production visibility, inventory accuracy, and dispatch tracking — built around how your floor actually runs.
AI automation for manufacturing replaces manual production tracking with live systems that pull data from your floor, flag inventory gaps before they stop a line, and keep dispatch and finance in sync. SBD builds these as custom dashboards and workflows on low-code platforms, typically shipping in four to six weeks.
What usually breaks
Production data lives in three places at once
Floor registers, spreadsheets, and someone’s WhatsApp. Nobody can answer "where is this order" without phoning three people, and the answer is already an hour old.
Dispatch waits on manual paperwork
Invoices and challans are typed by hand after the fact, so trucks idle and the finance team reconciles from memory at month end.
Stock counts are trusted until they are not
Manual stock tracking drifts quietly, then surfaces as a shortage mid-run or as capital sitting in overstocked raw material.
Everything depends on one person knowing
Real-time status lives in a supervisor’s head. When they are on leave, the process stalls — and none of it is auditable later.
The systems we ship
Live production dashboards
Role-based dashboards showing every production stage as it happens — input, drawing, output, dispatch — so supervisors and management see the same number at the same time.
Inventory visibility with reorder alerts
Stock levels tied to actual consumption, with thresholds that raise an alert before a line stops rather than after.
Automated documents and printing
Reports, invoices and dispatch paperwork generated from live data and sent straight to a floor printer — no re-typing, no version drift.
Supplier and ETA tracking
Inbound material status and supplier updates captured in one place, so planning works from real dates rather than promised ones.
Typical Stack
- Bubble.io
- Airtable
- SmartSuite
- n8n
- Make.com
- Cloudflare Workers
- PrintNode
- Supabase
Where we have done this
Multi-User Production Dashboard
— Copper Wire ManufacturerA copper wire manufacturer moved from manual production tracking to a live multi-user dashboard — 45% faster order processing and 60% better data accuracy across 10+ modules.
Order & Dispatch Management System
— Building Material SupplierA building material supplier replaced manual order and dispatch coordination with a single system across multiple stakeholders.
Manufacturing, answered
Do we have to replace our existing ERP?
No. Most of our manufacturing work sits alongside an existing ERP or accounting system rather than replacing it. We integrate through APIs so the ERP stays the system of record, while the layer we build handles the day-to-day visibility and workflow it was never good at.
How long does a production system take to build?
A focused dashboard or tracking system typically goes live in two to four weeks. A full operations system spanning production, dispatch and reporting usually runs four to six weeks, depending on how many stages and integrations are involved.
Will this work if our floor staff are not technical?
That is the normal case. We design for the person actually entering data on the floor, usually on a phone or a shared tablet, with role-based access so each user sees only their step. We also run the mapping on site rather than over a call, because what management describes and what the floor does are rarely identical.
Related solutions
Most operations problems cross more than one boundary. These are the areas that usually come up alongside manufacturing.
Not sure where the bottleneck is?
That is what the free workflow audit is for. We map how your operations actually run and tell you what is worth automating — before anyone talks about scope or price.
Claim a Free Workflow Audit