Month-end close cut from eleven working days to four

Brightforge machine precision components across two sites in the north-west. They were running an ERP that nobody wanted to touch, surrounded by spreadsheets that had quietly become load-bearing — the production schedule, the stock reconciliation and most of the management reporting all lived outside the system that was supposed to hold them.

Month-end took eleven working days and the same two people every time. Neither could take leave in the first fortnight of a month. When we were introduced, the finance director’s stated objective was not a new ERP: it was to stop the close being a single point of failure with two names on it.

What we did

Discovery ran eight days across both sites and produced a fit assessment that recommended against two of the four integrations Brightforge had assumed they needed — the underlying processes turned out to be artefacts of the old system rather than requirements of the business.

We deployed ERPNext into their own AWS account with development, test and production environments defined as code. Configuration covered a two-company structure, a rebuilt chart of accounts, item masters across roughly 4,000 parts, and production planning with BOMs for the assemblies made at both sites.

Migration was the largest single line. Three years of transactions, opening balances and master data, with four dry runs at full production volume. The first two did not reconcile; the differences turned out to be a decade-old duplicate-supplier problem in the source data. We reported it, Brightforge’s team corrected it, and the third run balanced.

Go-live was scheduled deliberately away from a quarter end, with a two-week hypercare period and a solution architect on site for the first close.

The outcome

The first month-end on ERPNext took six working days. The third took four, and it has stayed there. More usefully, it no longer depends on two specific people — five members of the finance team can now run it.

The spreadsheet estate is gone from the close process. Production scheduling moved into ERPNext, which surfaced a capacity problem at the smaller site that the spreadsheets had been averaging away.

Brightforge run the platform in their own AWS account on Enhanced support. We handle upstream upgrades on an agreed cadence and they retain full administrative access.