Customer Portal or ERP First? A Sensible Order for a Machine Shop | APX Digital
Customer portal or ERP first? A sensible order for a machine shop
The question comes up in every shop that has outgrown its spreadsheet: do we buy an ERP, or do we build the customer portal first? The short answer for a 5 to 50 person business is usually the portal, because quotes and order-status phone calls are where the week disappears, and because a portal is a matter of weeks while a full MRP or ERP project is a matter of months. The rest of this post is the evidence, including the cases where ERP first is the right call.
What each one fixes
| Customer portal | ERP / MRP system | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it serves | The people paying you | You and the shop floor |
| What it does | Quotes, order status, documents, reorders | Stock, bills of materials, costing, scheduling, purchasing |
| Time to value | Weeks | Months to select and implement |
| What it fixes | The gap between enquiry and a price, and the "where's my job?" call | What happens once the order is on the floor |
| Data risk | Low, as long as prices and lead times are real | High, because everything downstream depends on clean item and stock data |
Where the week goes
Starlight Bedrooms, a Bolton furniture manufacturer with 17 staff, described the old process in Made Smarter's own case study: a designer measured by hand, drew a plan, passed it to someone else for a 2D CAD drawing, and that drawing was priced manually and posted out. It took "anything up to a week". Their fix linked design, costing, materials and workflow planning, with the target of quoting in a day instead of a week. They forecast a 15% productivity increase, production rising from 10 rooms a week to 15, and up to nine new jobs.
Consider what that means in a machine shop. The quote is the customer's first experience of your competence, and a week is a long time to wait while the enquiry is still warm.
Hector Finch, a 40-staff decorative lighting manufacturer in Leominster with roughly 65% of its business in the USA, went the other way. Its warehouse and despatch ran on Sage50 and CIM50, on paper, with no barcoding, and its own verdict was that the system was "too small for us and not a proper manufacturing system". It won a £20,000 Made Smarter West Midlands grant and bought an Access FactoryMaster MRP system. Kevin Davies, Head of Operations, said they "wanted to keep a better track of our orders and have live data while reducing our use of paper", and admitted what most suppliers leave out: "historically our bill of materials were not entirely accurate."
That last line is the whole argument for sequencing. An MRP is only as good as the BOM under it. Buying the system does not fix the data; it exposes it.
Why ERP projects run long
Panorama Consulting's 2026 ERP Report surveyed 170 organisations between January 2025 and January 2026: median annual revenue $200.5 million, median project timeline nine months. More than a quarter went over budget, most commonly because of an unexpected need for additional technology, which the report traces to poor selection and misfits found late. Where projects overran, the most common cause was organisational: governance, resistance to process redesign, sign-offs that never arrive.
Those respondents are far larger than a 20-person shop, so do not copy their timeline. Take the shape of it instead. Enterprise software projects are measured in months, and the risk sits in process change, not in the software.
The order that works
First, fix the customer-facing flow. Quote to order status, in one place the customer can log into. It earns money, it is quick to build, and it is reversible if you change your mind.
Second, clean the data the portal stands on. Starlight's audit found product prices that were out of date, which was costing the business money. Hector Finch's BOM was not accurate. Whichever system you buy, that work happens anyway. Doing it inside a small, customer-facing project is cheaper than doing it in the middle of an ERP rollout.
Third, widen into the back office. By then you know what your quotes actually contain, which is what a system selection needs as an input. This is also when a grant becomes realistic: Made Smarter West Midlands funds up to 50% of a digital project for manufacturing and engineering SMEs, to a maximum of £20,000, and a scoped, costed project with work packages is what a funder expects to read.
The exception: if stock accuracy, costing or scheduling is the bottleneck and customers rarely ask you anything between order and delivery, go straight to the internal system. Do not build a portal nobody asked for.
What it costs from us
Our published pricing, for sizing against any quote you already hold. Websites and portals run on subscription tiers: Launch at £99 a month, Growth at £149 (adds lead capture and Google Business Profile sync), and Engine at £199 (adds bespoke quote and booking tools, plus CRM sync). Those are 12-month terms and you own the site outright at month 12, after which aftercare is £75 a month or a full handover of the files with no lock-in. We also do one-off builds you own from day one: from £550 for a smaller site, £750 Gold, £997 Platinum, £1,997 Diamond, with optional care from £45 to £150 a month.
An ERP or MRP licence plus implementation is a different order of spend and usually a different supplier. If your project is manufacturing technology rather than a website, the grant route is explained here, and so is the wider picture of grants, match funding and loans.
Before you sign anything
- Who owns the portal when the contract ends, and what happens to the data?
- Can it show live stock and lead times, or will it quote from a spreadsheet that is a week old?
- Which single number is this project meant to move, and how will you measure it in 90 days?
What we do at APX
We build the customer-facing layer: quote forms, order status, documents, and the CRM links behind them. We are Birmingham based and work with manufacturers and engineers across the West Midlands, and we will tell you when the job you have described is not ours.
The starting point is a 30-minute Digital and Funding Check, at no cost and no obligation. We look at where the admin and the missed work actually are, then say plainly which piece to fix first. Email Info@apxdigital.io or call 07753 226214.
Case study details from the Made Smarter West Midlands case studies for Starlight Bedrooms and Hector Finch, accessed 16 September 2026. ERP project data from Panorama Consulting Group's 2026 ERP Report (respondent data collected January 2025 to January 2026, 170 respondents). Pricing from the APX Digital price card, September 2026.
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