To ERP or Not to ERP
1 Aug 2025
The Digital Ceiling: When SME Manufacturers Outgrow Their Tools
Your machines are running. Orders are up. So why can’t you see where the profit’s going? Is traditional ERP really the answer? For many, it becomes a trap.
Here’s what we’ve learned after decades of scaling factories and deploying ERPs - and why we’re building something better.
When Spreadsheets Start to Break: The Hidden Cost of Low Operational Maturity
Scaling a manufacturing operation is tough! And is rarely achieved through luck. It’s built on a solid foundation of good instincts, sound judgment, and the engineer's mindset to drive productivity, bringing order to chaos.
In smaller ‘jobbing shops’, we’ve seen incredible throughput achieved with nothing more than a few well-maintained spreadsheets, a dry-wipe board, and some seasoned operators.
Flexible. Cheap. Effective… until it isn’t.
At a certain point, the sheer volume of tasks to plan, track, and analyse overwhelms even the most well-maintained spreadsheet or whiteboard system. The time spent maintaining these tools, aligning teams, and chasing down answers outweighs the cost of implementing a purpose-built platform.
At Therion, we work with manufacturers who’ve reached this tipping point. They’re growing fast, in people, product lines, and complexity, but their systems haven’t kept up. Here are some of the most common pain points we encounter:
Manual data entry steals time and trust
Relying on humans to maintain critical data across spreadsheets or disconnected systems introduces risk and inefficiency:
Data entry is slow and error-prone.
Inconsistencies erode trust in metrics.
Reports are often outdated or incomplete by the time they’re reviewed.
Soon, decisions are based on stale or missing information, and teams fly blind. Month-end figures may show the bank balance, but there's little clarity on how that position was reached, or how to improve it. Job or part-level profitability is often vague, inaccurate, or completely absent.
Operational maturity lags behind growth
Most small manufacturers grow by focusing on product development, customer relationships, and agility, not back-office systems. That makes sense in the early days. But as the business scales, so do the risks:
Margins shrink.
Complexity increases.
Instinct and experience alone can no longer drive operations.
Without intentional investment in operational infrastructure, businesses hit invisible ceilings - unable to scale efficiently or profitably.
Running on retrospective data
The traditional “old school” approach to operations is reactive by design. Reports arrive days or weeks after the fact. Data is manually reconciled from multiple sources. Finance teams act more like forensic accountants than strategic partners.
As product lines grow, staffing models evolve, and production methods diversify, this retrospective view becomes a serious liability. Key questions - What happened? Why? What should we do next? - can’t be answered quickly or accurately.
Change comes too late
Many SME manufacturers don’t seek a solution until:
Profitability is dangerously low
Growth stalls
A sale or investment round is on the horizon
That’s often when businesses start seriously thinking about those three letters: ERP.
By then, significant opportunities for optimisation, cost control, and margin growth may have already slipped away.
Key Thresholds: When to Consider Digital Solutions
Digital platforms like ERP systems become essential when a business outgrows hands-on oversight and starts adding layers of management. Here’s what that looks like:
Stage | Symptoms you'll notice | What becomes critical |
|---|---|---|
Early Growth ~£1–3m |
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Mid-Growth ~£3–7m |
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Scaling Up ~£7–10m+ |
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If you recognise your business having these symptoms, spreadsheets aren’t just slowing you down - they’re actively costing you margin. This is exactly when founders come to us. They’ve outgrown duct tape and good intentions, and need real systems to scale profitably.
Manufacturing ERPs: Powerful, but Stuck in Time
When chosen wisely and implemented well, ERP systems can be transformative.
But here’s the strange part: the core technology hasn’t changed much since UK SMEs started adopting it back in the 1990s.
To put that in perspective: it took just 33 years to go from the Spitfire’s maiden flight to Concorde going supersonic.
Meanwhile, ERP systems have been… refining.
The Real Barrier Isn’t Technology, It’s Trust and Cost
For many SME owners, the challenge isn’t whether they need a system; it’s navigating the maze of options, pricing models, and unclear value propositions.
ERP pricing often feels like train ticketing: confusing, inconsistent, and oddly expensive for something so well-established.
Given the maturity of these systems, you'd expect value; instead, many SMEs are left recoiling in horror at five or six-figure quotes. When you're turning over £3–5m and watching every headcount, it's hard to justify dropping six figures on a system you hope will deliver ROI in 24 months.
Once you’ve made the decision, you’ve then got to consider managing the change of the implementation. The technology is often the easy part. Getting team buy-in and adoption needs careful planning, and an intuitive system isn’t optional.
So, manufacturers can find themselves in a state of paralysis, stuck between knowing they need to change and not knowing where to begin.
A Market Ripe for Change: From Concorde to EasyJet, and ERP to SaaS
The UK has around 250,000 manufacturing firms, with 85% turning over less than £5m. That’s a massive segment with enormous potential and right now, a lot of it is trapped under a layer of complexity, indecision, and ERP inertia.
But things are changing.
Just as aviation hit a technical ceiling with Concorde, and the industry shifted focus to accessibility and cost, ushering in the rise of low-cost carriers, we’re seeing the same thing with ERP.
After decades of technical refinement, the real breakthrough for SME manufacturers isn’t more complexity, it’s simplified, focused solutions that deliver the true value without the feature bloat and huge price tag.
Our tools for manufacturers do 80% of what a traditional ERP does, but with 20% of the overhead, and is live within weeks, not months. Therion is reinventing the technology stack for manufacturers and industrial SMEs.
The Bottom Line
ERP isn’t dead. But for SMEs, it’s overdue a rethink.
The future lies in leaner, modular, cloud-native tools; platforms designed for how SME manufacturers actually work, not how enterprise software thinks they should.
That’s the future we’re building at Therion.
We’ve lived and breathed the challenges of manufacturing. We operated businesses that grew rapidly in product lines, production complexity hit invisible operational ceilings, and struggled to truly understand their performance and profit. We scaled from whiteboards to spreadsheets to ERPs. This change wasn't just about adopting new software, but about fundamentally rethinking how we managed data and made decisions.
When we got it right, the benefits were transformative:
Real-time Visibility: Instant, accurate views of our capacity, individual product margins, and overall financial health. No more waiting for month-end reports to understand where we stood.
Empowered Decision-Making: Enabled our managers to make objective, data-driven decisions. Run "what-if" scenarios for planning quickly and effectively.
Enhanced Accountability: Provided clear, agreed-upon metrics that defined performance for teams and individuals.
Optimised Resource Utilisation: Clearly could see how our machines, labour, and materials were being used, quickly identifying and addressing inefficiencies.
Accurate Costing and Intentional Pricing: Understood the true cost of manufacturing each product, allowing us to set prices that ensure healthy profitability and support business growth.
Streamlined & Automated Processes: Reduced manual effort, minimised errors, and decreased operational complexity by integrating everything from quoting and production planning to inventory and invoicing within one system.
In just three years, we improved profitability by £2.9m from -8% to 12%, transitioning from a loss-making position to one of profitable growth.
Have You Outgrown Your Tools?
If you're not sure whether it’s time to consider a digital platform, run through this quick checklist. If you answer “yes” to three or more, it’s time to re-evaluate your systems.
You rely on gut feel to make pricing or scheduling decisions
You can’t see job-level or product-level profitability with confidence
Your finance team rebuilds the same reports from scratch every month
You don't know your true capacity (people, machines, or materials)
Managers can’t agree on what “good performance” looks like
You lose time hunting for numbers that should be at your fingertips
You can't model “what-if” scenarios quickly (e.g. demand shifts, overtime)
Most of your operational knowledge lives in people’s heads or spreadsheets
You only find out about profit drops or delays after month-end
You’re planning for growth - but can’t tell what’s holding you back
What Now?
If any of that rings true, we can help.
We’ve worked with manufacturers who’ve hit the same ceiling, and built Therion to solve the specific problems they faced. Our tools give you the visibility, structure, and confidence to grow profitably.
Contact us at hello@therion.co or request a free digital audit.