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Blog August 20, 2026
From Paper Schedules to Live Dashboards: Rebuilding Production Planning in NetSuite
Updated: August20, 2026 | 3 min read
A Canadian food manufacturer spent 50 years growing on a production floor run by spreadsheets, printed schedules, and a legacy UNIX ERP system that fewer and fewer people understood. Every schedule change meant printing a new one, and every commission report meant someone rebuilding a spreadsheet by hand and hoping the numbers still tied out.
We worked with the company to move onto Oracle NetSuite, and the goal went beyond replacing an old system to give production, purchasing, and finance a single, live view of what was happening on the floor.
The real risk was everything around the ERP
While the legacy system technically worked, the risk had grown around it, in the manually generated schedule reports, the paper-based work orders, and the commission and EDI processes stitched together with spreadsheets and workarounds. This led to challenges with complexities when trying to scale, while preventing leadership of getting a clear picture in real time.
What we built
The team needed to see what was scheduled, what raw materials were on hand, and what was moving through production, without a system built for a much bigger plant. For a team that had never run supply planning through a formal MRP system, adopting one wholesale would have meant a significant shift in how the plant worked, and that’s a big ask for an operation mid-transition already. To overcome this obstacle built two manufacturing-specific reports directly inside NetSuite, sized for how their operation runs on a daily basis. One handles schedule reporting, inventory forecasting, and raw material planning. The other gives work order visibility across the floor, so teams can see status without walking the line or waiting on a printout. Together, they function as a lighter, purpose-built version of MRP, tuned to this manufacturer’s product mix and production rhythm rather than a generic template.
We paired that with purpose-built functionality for commission management and EDI invoice exports, along with custom operational reports and manufacturing KPI tracking, so finance and operations could pull what they needed instead of rebuilding it by hand.
Our approach and the results
We build these dashboards natively inside clients’ own NetSuite environments, turning live purchasing, inventory, and order data into something a planner or ops lead can act on right away
The manufacturer replaced a high-risk legacy environment with a modern, scalable platform built for its next stage of growth. Financial, operational, manufacturing, and inventory data now live in one system instead of four, and production planning, inventory forecasting, and lot traceability run through purpose-built NetSuite workflows instead of paper and spreadsheets. Commission management and EDI invoicing, once manual and error-prone, now run through the system itself.
The pattern runs deeper than one client
This isn’t the only manufacturer where a lighter, tailored planning layer made more sense than a full system rollout. We’ve applied the same thinking elsewhere: build around how a team already runs its operation, rather than asking them to adopt a new one just because the system supports it. If you want to see how we do just that, watch the full demo below:
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