One system to run sales, manufacturing, development & testing for a solar maker
A solar panel manufacturer was running its whole operation, sales, production, development, materials, and reliability testing, across a stack of disconnected tools and spreadsheets. Nothing agreed with anything else, and no one could see a panel's full story end to end.
Custom platform · multiple systems synchronized into one
The challenge
Building a solar panel is a long chain: a sales order becomes a quote, then a PO, then production and development work, drawing on a deep bill of materials, guided by process steps, tracked per serialized unit, and finally validated in reliability chambers. Each stage lived in its own tool.
- Every system spoke a different language
Sales, manufacturing, materials, and testing each had their own data. Reconciling them was manual and constant.
- No genealogy
A product is built from parts, and can itself go into another product. Nothing tracked that lineage end to end.
- The shop floor ran on paper
Operators followed instructions scattered across docs and spreadsheets, with time and quality captured after the fact, if at all.
How we built it
We built T3Manufacturing: one custom platform that takes the best of the generic MES, ERP, and PLM tools and synchronizes them into a single place to create solar panels and the parts that go into them.
- A sales spine: orders flow from inquiry to quote to a confirmed build, and each line item spawns a production order for the panel it builds.
- BOM + genealogy: every product carries a bill of materials and lineage; parts go into products and products into other products, all traceable.
- Process steps as the recipe: each step consumes a specific material, has a duration and a Qcp, and carries the manufacturing guide the operator follows.
- Per-serial tracking: every unit is serialized with its own build record, QR code, time tracking, and an NCR process tied to steps and measurements.
- Materials + facilities: live inventory with demand and allocation, plus a dedicated portal to schedule the reliability chambers and see availability.
See it in action
A walk through seven core screens, reconstructed to mirror the live platform. It advances on its own, or step through it yourself. Customer and supplier names are redacted; data shown is illustrative.
New
4
Quoting
7
Confirmed
9
In production
12
Delivered
21
| Order | Account | Panels | Stage | Ship by | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ORD-3391 | Northwind Power | 240 | In production | Aug 12 | R. Sato |
| ORD-3388 | Cascade Grid | 96 | Confirmed | Aug 20 | R. Sato |
| ORD-3385 | Vela Energy | 480 | Quoting | — | M. Diaz |
| ORD-3380 | Aria Solar | 60 | Delivered | Jul 30 | M. Diaz |
| ORD-3377 | Halcyon Utilities | 300 | New | — | R. Sato |
Every sales order, from inquiry to PO
- Orders move through a clear pipeline, from first inquiry through quoting to a confirmed build
- KPIs across the top: open, quoted, in progress, ready to invoice, closed
- From each line item, you spin up a production order for the panel it builds
Results
Sales, manufacturing, development, materials, and testing in a single synchronized system
Every serial traceable through its BOM, process steps, materials, and time
Operators build from guided steps with NCR, lot numbers, and time tracking
The spreadsheets and disconnected tools collapsed into one system
We build systems like this one: deep, real operations software that runs a business end to end, pulls the tools you already have into one place your team works in, and is yours to own and extend.
If your operation runs across five tools
When sales, production, materials, and testing all live in different systems, we can bring them into one platform your team runs on.