IndiNature: from Excel to full traceability in a couple of months

IndiNature makes natural fibre insulation in Scotland. Founded in 2016, the company turns natural fibres, including industrial hemp grown here in the UK, into insulation products for the construction industry. About seven people run the factory and operations, with a separate sales team alongside.

Within a few months of moving to MRPeasy, IndiNature had orders, inventory, purchasing, production and costs under control in one system. Supply Chain Manager Nina McKeown’s advice to other small manufacturers is blunt: “Take the jump. It’s worth it. Don’t wait.” Here is how they did it, and where we came in.

When spreadsheets stop being enough

In the early days IndiNature’s production was simple. A limited number of raw materials, manageable on spreadsheets. Then the volumes picked up.

“When the volume started picking up, we realised we needed to see the whole pipeline, from sales to production, shipment, and invoicing,” Nina explains. “It was all being done in Excel, and we realised that wasn’t going to work.”

The team had experience of big ERP platforms, which made the next decision easier rather than harder. An enterprise scale system would have added complexity a business of this size did not need. “My background is SAP, and I realised that wasn’t going to be the right way to go for us.”

Cost and flexibility decided it

IndiNature compared several options, Sage among them, on cost, efficiency and flexibility. MRPeasy came out with the best balance of the three.

Set up began in the second half of 2022 and the first shipment went through MRPeasy on 2 November. With little legacy data to migrate, the whole implementation took only a couple of months. “It was quite a quick implementation, to be honest,” Nina says.

The hard part was agreeing how the business works

The real effort was not the software. It was the conversations about how IndiNature wanted to structure its own data: product codes, product groups, naming conventions, the internal standards every system depends on. Once those decisions were made, putting them into MRPeasy was straightforward.

“We all had different backgrounds from different systems, so at first MRPeasy took some getting used to,” Nina says. “But as soon as you get into it, it’s so easy.”

A year in, the questions got more detailed

After roughly a year IndiNature knew the software well, and knew its own requirements better too. The company had connected MRPeasy to Xero and wanted to sharpen up accounting processes, cost follow up, bills of materials, packaging and operating routines.

This is the point at which they brought us in. We are a UK implementation partner for MRPeasy, and the work here was not about fixing fundamental problems. It was about refining how a maturing business used a system it already had, which is often the most valuable kind of consultancy there is.

One system from quote to invoice

MRPeasy now runs most of IndiNature’s operation. Every customer order goes through it from quote to production, then shipping and invoicing.

“We use customer order creation, shipments, stocktaking, inventory, placing orders to vendors, manufacturing, the production module, and all the documentation that comes with shipping,” Nina says.

Three areas matter most to her: production tracking, control over raw material inventory, and order processing. Having them in one place means a clear picture of the whole operation without stitching spreadsheets together by hand.

Cost tracking, almost daily

With manufacturing, purchasing and inventory in a single system, IndiNature can see what its products actually cost to make. “MRPeasy helps us keep an eye on production costs and make sure our margins are healthy. We use the cost tracking feature almost daily.”

Customers get an answer straight away

When a customer rings about an order, nobody has to hunt through spreadsheets or ask another department. “I can very quickly see where the order is in the system and when it’s going to be delivered.”

Custom fields have earned a particular fan. They let IndiNature shape its records around the information each department needs. “I really love the custom fields. Sales might look at one thing, finance might look at something else, so everybody in the organisation can use the information they need.”

Traceability from material lot to product label

IndiNature uses barcodes and lot numbers to carry information from material lots through production and onto the finished product labels. “MRPeasy provides us with end to end traceability. We don’t have issues very often, but if something occurs, we know exactly which batch it was.”

“Easily a nine or a ten”

For a company scaling up, Nina rates the system highly. “I would say MRPeasy is easily a nine or a ten. At the level we are right now, as we scale up, it’s the perfect system.”

Her message to other small manufacturers still on spreadsheets is that the move is far less daunting than it looks from the outside. “Don’t be scared to use it because it’s so easy. Take the jump. It’s worth it. Don’t wait.”

Scaling up on spreadsheets?

IndiNature’s story is a useful one because the implementation was quick and the value came from getting the business decisions right first. If you want to see whether MRPeasy would suit a growing operation like yours, get in touch. We are happy to talk it through before you decide anything.