Why I Built Nexshift: The MES Problem No One Talks About
I spent twenty years in manufacturing before I wrote a single line of code. Goodman Fielder, Campbell Arnott's, Signet. Different products, different sites, same problem showing up again and again.
Every plant I worked at had some version of the same setup: a whiteboard on the wall, a spreadsheet nobody trusted, a quality folder full of paper that lived in a filing cabinet until an auditor asked for it, and a maintenance system that was really just a guy named Dave who knew where everything was until the day Dave retired.
None of this was because the people running these plants were bad at their jobs. Quite the opposite. I worked with some of the sharpest operations people I've ever met — people who could solve a line stoppage in ten minutes flat and knew every quirk of every machine on the floor. The problem wasn't the people. It was the tools.
The gap nobody talks about
Here's the thing about manufacturing execution systems. If you're running a plant with a few thousand employees and a seven-figure IT budget, you've got options. SAP has a module for that. So does Oracle. So does half a dozen enterprise vendors who will happily fly out a team, spend six months on implementation, and charge you a licence fee per user that scales with your headcount.
But if you're a 50 to 500 person manufacturer — and there are thousands of these businesses across Australian food, FMCG, packaging and plastics — none of that is built for you. The enterprise platforms are too expensive, too complex, and frankly too slow to implement for a business your size. So what happens instead? You end up stitching together Excel, a shared drive, a whiteboard, and whatever your ERP happens to track, which is usually not much beyond stock levels.
I lived this exact gap. I've sat in NCR meetings trying to reconstruct a batch history from three different spreadsheets and a supervisor's memory. I've watched a quality manager spend an entire Friday afternoon manually collating pre-start checks because the paper forms from four different lines needed to be typed up before Monday's audit. None of that time was adding value. It was just the cost of not having a system that fit the size of the business.
What I actually wanted
When I started sketching out what became Nexshift, I wasn't trying to build a smaller version of SAP. I was trying to build the system I wish I'd had. One platform that covers production tracking, quality, batch traceability, maintenance and safety — without the six month implementation and without a licence fee that punishes you for having more people on the floor.
That per-user pricing model bothers me more than it probably should. You shouldn't have to choose between giving your leading hands visibility into the system and keeping your software costs under control. Everyone who needs access should have access. That's not a nice-to-have, that's the whole point of the system actually working.
Where Nexshift is now
We're still early. I'm building this alongside real conversations with operations managers, quality managers and GMs who are living the same problems I lived for twenty years. Every feature we build starts with an actual production floor problem — not a feature request from a sales team trying to win a deal against a competitor.
If you're running a mid-size manufacturing site in Australia and you're tired of trusting a spreadsheet with your batch traceability, or your quality team is still walking the floor with a clipboard, I'd genuinely like to hear what your setup looks like. This blog is going to be a mix of what we're building, what we're learning, and the same kind of straight-talking floor experience I've always tried to bring to this industry.
No corporate spin. Just what actually works, and what doesn't.