Case Study — Manufacturing
From a shop-floor spreadsheet to a scheduling platform in production.
MFGSync is GrayBeck’s production-scheduling platform for manufacturers. It started the way durable tools do — as an add-in inside the spreadsheet a scheduler already lived in — and became a multi-tenant platform running in production. The same arc as our finance work, on the shop floor.
01The Problem
The schedule lives on a whiteboard and in one person’s head.
On most shop floors, the production schedule is a whiteboard, a shared spreadsheet, and a scheduler who knows what the board does not. Capacity, job sequencing, and the order of operations get balanced by memory and long experience. It works until it does not — a late material, a machine down, a rush order — and the ripple is invisible until it lands back on the floor.
The scheduling logic is real and hard-won. The problem is where it lives: in a file that cannot see the machines, and in a person who cannot be in two places at once.
02Where It Started
We started inside the spreadsheet, not next to it.
The first version was Forge: an Excel add-in that sat inside the workbook the scheduler already used. Forward deployment means meeting the work where it happens, and on a shop floor the work happens in a spreadsheet. Forge put real sequencing and capacity logic behind the cells — clean layering under a familiar surface — so the scheduler kept their tool and gained a system underneath it.
That is the same move we make in finance: do not rip out the spreadsheet, pull the complexity out of it. Forge proved the logic where the work is done, which is the only place worth proving it.
03What We Built
Then we rebuilt it as a platform the whole floor can see.
An add-in on one machine is a start, not a system. MFGSync is Forge’s logic rebuilt as a deployed, multi-tenant platform: a drag-drop Gantt where operations move across lines and days, capacity planning that respects what each line can actually run, and sequencing that shows how a change on one line lands on the rest. Background jobs keep the schedule current as the floor changes underneath it.
It ships the way our platforms ship — deployed to its own environment behind a custom domain, released through continuous integration, built multi-tenant so more than one plant can run on it. The scheduler still recognizes the work. Now everyone can see it.
04Deployed
Running in production, stated plainly.
MFGSync is a GrayBeck product, and we label it the way we label everything: it is deployed and multi-tenant, not a prototype and not a slide. Here is what shipped.
05The Pattern
The model travels.
MFGSync is the finance arc in a different building. Embed where the work happens, ship something real in weeks, and rebuild it into a platform that operates. The vocabulary changes — lines and changeovers instead of funds and covenants — but the method does not. If your operation runs on a spreadsheet that has quietly become the system of record, that is exactly the situation we build for.
Run your floor on something you can see.
Thirty minutes with an engineer who has built this — not a salesperson.
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