Smart Factory Expo 2025: MRPeasy’s first UK show, and we were on the stand

On 4 and 5 June 2025 MRPeasy exhibited in the UK for the first time, at Smart Factory Expo, part of Smart Manufacturing Week at the NEC Birmingham. We were on the stand with them for both days, and we had rather more to do with it than that.

Alongside her work at Smart Manufacture, Sara handles UK marketing and PR for MRPeasy, and it was Sara who made the case for them to exhibit here. So the stand at the NEC was, in a small way, ours too.

A show about technology, with a system people can actually run

Smart Factory Expo leans heavily towards advanced manufacturing technology: automation driven by AI, sensor based control systems, robotics, integration tools and a great deal of specialist software. The hall was busy from start to finish.

MRPeasy stood among some of the most established ERP providers in the industry, and it held its own. The proposition is straightforward: the functionality a small manufacturer needs, without the complexity a small manufacturer cannot afford to carry. That message landed well in a hall full of impressive but often intimidating technology.

The theme that kept coming up

Several of the partners and customers on the stand said a version of the same thing. ERP has a reputation for high cost, long implementations and overwhelming complexity, and MRPeasy is seen as the low risk choice in that landscape. Start small, see real value within a month, and avoid the heavy upfront investment that stops so many firms from doing anything at all.

We hear that in our own work all the time. The businesses we implement for are not short of ambition. They are short of the time and the budget to do a traditional ERP project, and they want a system that fits round the business rather than the reverse.

Demos, old friends and new faces

The MRPeasy consultants gave dozens of live demonstrations over the two days, working through real production problems with the people who brought them. For us, the highlight was meeting long standing MRPeasy users in person, many of whom talked about how the system had grown with them.

Plenty of visitors were looking at manufacturing software for the first time, and those conversations are the ones we enjoy most, because they are usually about the business rather than the software. What is going wrong on the floor, where the stock figures come from, why the delivery dates keep moving. Once that is on the table, working out whether a system like MRPeasy will help is the easy part.

Thank you, and see you next time

To everyone who came by the stand, whether to explore ERP for the first time or to push an existing operation further, thank you. The response at the NEC was strong enough that MRPeasy came back to the UK for Southern Manufacturing in February 2026 and Smart Manufacturing Week in June 2026, and we were on the stand for both.

If you would like to talk about what we discussed at the show, get in touch.