Built for people who make things.
There is a lot of business software for selling things out of a box. There is much less for businesses where somebody has to cut it, build it, finish it and load it first. Gydon is for the second kind, and the decisions in it follow from that.
The sales system knew about the order and nothing about the job
Gydon is built and run in the UK by Online Marketing Surgery. It started as a CRM for our own work and grew the operational half because the businesses we were closest to kept running into the same wall.
That is still the thing it does that most alternatives do not. Plenty of systems will handle a bill of materials and call it manufacturing. Far fewer know that the work has a sequence, that the sequence needs machines and people, and that both of those are already busy.
It is not somebody else's product with our badge on it. The people who wrote it are the people you will be talking to.
The short version
- Built, hosted and supported in the UK
- One application, licensed a module at a time
- Grew out of a working agency and the manufacturers around it
- Routing, costing and the shop floor are the parts we know best
- Three Android apps for the floor, the stores and the road
- Syncs with Xero rather than trying to replace it
Six decisions that shaped the rest of it
Each of these was a wrong turn first. They are the reason the software is the shape it is.
Routing is not part of the bill of materials
Our first attempt made labour a line on the parts list. Simpler, and wrong: it could not express a work centre, so it could not answer the question of two jobs both wanting the same saw on Tuesday. We pulled it apart and did it properly.
A production step is an ordinary task
We could have built a parallel world of operations with their own screens, time recording and reporting. Instead a stage on a job is a task like any other, so it arrives with an estimate, an owner, a clock and a place in the workload without any of those being invented twice.
The money has to be exact
Costing is done in exact decimal arithmetic rather than floating point. We changed it after watching two products move by a penny depending on nothing more than the order a loop ran in. A costing engine that is nearly right is worse than none, because you will not know which figures to distrust.
Nobody types a password on the shop floor
A password typed on a screen in a workshop is a password the room has seen. Devices are authorised once with a code from the office and people identify themselves with a PIN or a card, so every hour and every pick is recorded against whoever actually did it.
A screen belongs where its records live
The task list is not filed under Manufacturing, even though production stages were the most interesting tasks in the system the week we built them. Filing everybody's work under one department tells everybody else their work belongs to somebody else. We got that wrong three times before we got it right.
Drag and drop has to earn its place
We built a production board where you dragged jobs between status columns, then deleted it. Setting a status is one click from a dropdown, and a dropdown works better on a tablet with gloves on. We kept dragging in planning, because moving a stage from Tuesday to Thursday is genuinely a movement in space.
A small team, and we would rather be straight about it
It cuts both ways. You will talk to people who know the software rather than to a call centre, and a sensible feature request can actually get built. What we cannot do is pretend to be a hundred person vendor with a global support rota.
If Gydon is the wrong fit for you, we will say so on the demo rather than three months into an implementation. That is not modesty, it is self interest: an unhappy customer costs far more than a deal we did not win.
A note on this website. Every screenshot on this site is the real software, photographed running, with sample data in it. None of the figures are mocked up, and there are no invented customer quotes anywhere on these pages. When we have case studies worth showing you, they will be real ones with names attached.
Come and argue with us about it
Book a demo and bring the awkward questions. They are the useful ones.