Industries
Order books are recovering. Machine budgets are not. That is the window for software.
How it works today
The bedrijfsbureau is one werkvoorbereider deciding how every job gets made, and a planner deciding when and on which machine. That same person calculates, releases the day's production orders and answers the phone. The orders reach the floor on paper with the drawing stapled to them, and the hours come back the next morning on a handwritten slip.
The aanvragen are back: Metaalunie's Q2 2026 barometer put domestic orders at plus 7 percent and export at plus 9 percent. Nobody measures the scoringspercentage, so nobody knows whether you lose on price or on speed. An RFQ lands as a PDF drawing, sometimes a STEP file, sometimes a photo of a broken part. One werkvoorbereider guesses the routing, phones a supplier for material and writes the offerte. Four days later it goes out, to a customer who mailed three other jobshops on Monday.
Every branche-ERP in this sector ships post-calculation. The module is not the problem. Hours reach it a day late off a handwritten urenbriefje, booked to the wrong order, with setup never split from run time. So the report is wrong, so nobody opens it, so the data gets worse. Restmateriaal never comes back into stock either, and the invoice for uitbesteed werk lands three weeks later with no order number, so somebody guesses which job it belonged to.
Progress is visible by walking the hall. A customer calls and the voorman goes to look. Nobody knows the real availability of the bottleneck machine either, because downtime is reported by exception and setup time hides inside run time. OEE is a feeling, and published benchmarks put typical CNC metalworking at 45 to 55 percent. You will not buy your way past that either: CBS has basismetaal en metaalproducten investing 19 percent less in 2026.
The werkvoorbereider who has been there 28 years knows which customer accepts which tolerance, which supplier is reliable on 316L, and what a job like this really takes. None of it is written down. 42 percent of technical firms now blame ageing staff for their shortage, up from 30 percent a year earlier, and 27 percent cannot fill a vacancy inside six months. There is no overlap period.
What we build for this sector
Not a menu of products. These are the pieces that tend to pay for themselves first in this line of work.
A touchscreen at the machine instead of a stack of printed production orders: today's jobs, the current drawing revision, start and stop, quantity good and afkeur, and a stoppage reason in one tap. Badge or NFC to sign in, gloves on, no keyboard. It writes back into Ridder iQ, Isah, MKG or Exact. If it takes longer than the paper it replaces, it has failed.
Part of Internal Tools & Admin PanelsStuklijsten and article numbers out of SOLIDWORKS into Ridder iQ, Isah or MKG. Production orders out of the ERP onto the screen at the machine. Machine signals in over OPC UA, MQTT or EUROMAP 77 and back out as booked hours. Supplier order confirmations in from Tradecloud or straight from email. We build on your vendor's documented route: read-only first, write-back only through supported endpoints.
Part of System Integrations & APIsThe decision underneath these numbers is which work to stop quoting for and which customer to reprice. Realised against quoted hours per operation, margin per order and per customer, scoringspercentage split by customer and by batch size, OEE and stoppage reasons per machine, leverbetrouwbaarheid as a trend line per customer. This is the number the DGA actually wants, and it is cheap to build once the hours are booked at the machine.
Part of Dashboards & Business IntelligenceOne dossier per serial number that fills itself while the job runs: as-built stuklijst, material certificates and chargenummers, meetrapporten, software versions, the manual and the EU declaration of conformity, retrievable by QR code years later. The Machineverordening applies from 20 January 2027 and tightens traceability of components and of software changes. Machines you ship after that date are in scope, and the file has to have been built while the work was on the floor.
Part of Document & Invoice AutomationEvery aanvraag, every meerwerk claim and every afkeur report follows the same path, with an owner, a deadline and a log of who decided what. A quote below target margin needs a second signature. A drawing revision only reaches the floor once it is released. And meerwerk gets invoiced, because it was recorded when it happened rather than remembered at month end.
Part of Workflow & Approval SystemsEvery company this size has one: an Access database or an Excel workbook holding the normtijden, the material prices and half the planning, built by somebody who left in 2019. Something breaks on every Office update and one person still dares touch it. We rebuild it as a real application with the same logic, with the ERP as the source of truth.
Part of Legacy System ModernizationSystems we connect to
Whatever we build around your ERP stands or falls on what that ERP lets in and out. MKG publishes its own API, Exact runs an App Store with more than 220 apps, Isah documents third-party integration, and CAD2M ships SOLIDWORKS connectors for MKG, Ridder iQ, Isah, Trimergo and Exact Online. On the machine side the vocabulary is OPC UA, MQTT and EUROMAP 77.
This is not an exhaustive list, and we are not a reseller for any of it. If a system has an API, a database, or an export, we can usually work with it. If it does not, we will tell you that before you spend anything.
Rules you work under
Two of the dates below are already fixed and neither comes with a transition period to lean on. The rest of this list does not reach you through the legislator. It reaches you through your largest customer, who passes his own reporting duty down to his suppliers.
What changes
Today
Around 110 RFQs arrive by email each month as PDFs or STEP files. The senior werkvoorbereider quotes about 25 a week and the backlog runs four to six working days. Hours are written on the printed werkbon and reach MKG the next morning, booked by the office to whichever order the handwriting suggests. Outsourced hardening and coating is chased by phone and matched to the order when there is time. The controller produces one company gross margin a month. Margin per order has never been seen.
After
An intake form and an email parser turn every RFQ into a structured record with customer, drawing, quantity and requested date, with a visible status. A calculation aid pulls the closest comparable jobs out of MKG's own history and puts quoted next to actual. Eight machines get a touchscreen showing the released orders for that day and taking start, stop, counts and a stoppage reason. Everything writes back through the MKG API.
The result
Quotes for the repeat-shaped share go out the same day. The werkvoorbereider keeps his week for the genuinely new work. Hours land in MKG on the day, so a real nacalculatie finally exists, and the junior no longer has to read one man's memory.
An illustrative scenario based on how work in this sector is typically organised, not a specific client.
Questions from this sector
On paper, often yes. Ridder iQ, Isah, MKG, Plan-de-CAMpagne and Exact all ship calculatie, nacalculatie and a shop floor module. The gap is rarely the feature. It is that the module was never configured, the normtijden were never populated, or the screen is too heavy for an operator with oily hands. PROPOS in Groningen sells exactly this layer on top of Ridder iQ, MKG, Plan-de-CAMpagne, Exact, Dynamics and SAP. That the category exists is the answer.
The most common objection and the most beatable. Anything reasonably modern speaks OPC UA or MQTT, and injection moulding machines speak EUROMAP 77, published under the OPC Foundation as OPC 40077. That is what we build on. Genuinely old kit needs a digital I/O gateway reading the signals that are already there, cycle complete, running, alarm. That is electrical work at the machine, we do not do it ourselves, and we would send you to your own installateur or to a party like Sensorfact. From the gateway onward it is ours. You get counts and downtime, not part programs, and for OEE that is enough.
He does. The obligation lands on whoever puts the finished product on the market, and as a toeleverancier that is almost never you. What reaches you is his data request: material types, origin, REACH and SVHC information, recyclability, batch and charge numbers, per delivered part. One questionnaire costs a KAM-coordinator two to three days, and they arrive from a different OEM each quarter in a different format. So the thing worth building is not a passport but one place where that data already lives, tied to the serienummer, so answering becomes an export. Your OEM will select on who can answer.
No IT'er is normal at 40 to 120 staff, where the ERP-beheerder is really the controller or the werkvoorbereider with a second hat on. That argues for managed, low-maintenance software and against another system somebody has to administer: one screen at the machine that keeps working when nobody logs in is worth more here than a platform full of options. On the budget, Metaalunie's investment sentiment sits around minus 28 percent, and a screen at the machine is not a machine. New programmatuur also frequently qualifies for WBSO at 36 percent in the first bracket, which has to be applied for in advance and never afterwards.
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Describe how the work flows now, including the parts held together by spreadsheets. We will tell you what is worth building and what is not.
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