Automation that bridges shop floor and ERP
Manufacturing runs on two clocks: the shop floor, where decisions are made in minutes, and the corporate back-office, where ERP, finance, and planning operate on weekly or monthly cycles. Primo deployments in discrete and process manufacturing close that gap — without replacing the systems on either side.
Two clocks, one set of decisions to make
Manufacturers live with a permanent mismatch between shop-floor speed and ERP speed. MES, quality systems, and floor scanners produce data continuously. Production plans, BOM updates, supplier orders, and quality reports flow back on much slower cycles, often via spreadsheets or operator re-entry. The result is that decisions get made on stale data — or correct data that arrives too late.
Add to this the supplier and customer integration burden: incoming forecasts, EDI feeds, certificates of analysis, ASNs, and quality documents from hundreds of trading partners, each with their own format. Most of this passes through email and shared folders before it reaches the system of record.
Primo deployments in this sector run inside the manufacturer's infrastructure boundary, including isolated plant networks where required. See deployment architecture →
Discrete manufacturing · process and continuous manufacturing · automotive · industrial equipment · chemicals · food and beverage · consumer packaged goods · plant-level back-office and corporate operations
Typical workflows we automate in manufacturing
Each pattern below is a recurring scenario across our manufacturing deployments. The focus here is what gets automated and how — typical outcomes across all patterns are aggregated in the section below.
- 01
ERP integration with shop-floor systems
Production data, machine status, scrap reports, and labour confirmations originate in MES, SCADA, and floor scanners. Most of this needs to land in ERP — for inventory updates, cost capture, and planning — but the integration was either never built or runs only nightly.
What Primo automates
- Pulling shift-level production, scrap, and labour data from MES and floor systems
- Validation and normalization against BOM, routing, and standard rates
- Posting to ERP for inventory, cost, and planning updates
- Exception flagging when shop-floor and ERP balances disagree
- Reconciliation reports back to operations and finance
- 02
Production planning and materials coordination
Production plans depend on a moving target: customer orders, supplier confirmations, machine availability, and inventory positions all change daily. Adjusting plans means pulling data from several systems, recalculating in spreadsheets, and pushing the result back as overrides.
What Primo automates
- Daily refresh of customer demand, confirmed orders, and forecast updates
- Reconciliation against current inventory and supplier confirmations
- Adjustment runs against MRP and APS systems
- Generation of revised production schedules and shortage reports
- Distribution to planners, supervisors, and supplier-facing teams
- 03
Quality reporting and certificates of analysis
Each production batch generates quality data that needs to be reviewed, packaged into a certificate of analysis, and either released to the customer or routed for disposition if out of spec. The testing itself is fast; the document assembly and routing around it are what stretch the cycle.
What Primo automates
- Quality data collection from LIMS, on-line testing, and operator entry
- Validation against customer and regulatory spec libraries
- Generation of certificates of analysis with full traceability
- Routing to customer portals, EDI feeds, and internal archives
- Out-of-spec disposition handling and rework documentation
- 04
Supplier and customer document handling
Manufacturers exchange enormous volumes of documents with trading partners: forecasts, POs, ASNs, certificates, invoices, returns. Most of this still arrives by email or portal download in formats that vary by partner.
What Primo automates
- Inbound document handling from email, EDI, and supplier portals
- Classification and field extraction across heterogeneous formats
- Validation against contract terms, master data, and reference catalogues
- Posting to ERP, quality, and warehouse systems
- Outbound document generation for customers and regulatory bodies
- 05
Materials management and inventory updates
Inventory levels in ERP rarely match the physical reality on the floor without continuous reconciliation against actual receipts, issues, scrap, and physical counts. Each adjustment requires data from a different system and approvals from a different role.
What Primo automates
- Reconciliation of physical counts against ERP inventory
- Posting of receipts, issues, transfers, and scrap from operational systems
- Cycle-count scheduling and exception routing
- Adjustment approvals through workflow with full audit trail
- Inventory accuracy and write-off reports back to finance and operations
What customers in manufacturing typically see
Aggregated ranges based on industry RPA benchmarks for the sector and Primo's deployments across discrete and process manufacturing operations. For customer-attested numbers from individual deployments, see customer stories →
Reduction in time on cross-system data work
Across MES-to-ERP flows and reconciliation. Depends on integration baseline.
Faster quality and CoA document turnaround
Per batch, comparing automated assembly to manual workflow.
Throughput on trading-partner document handling
Per document, comparing automated intake to manual entry.
Reduction in cost of back-office and planning support
For automated workflows across planning, materials, and quality.
Ranges synthesized from industry analyst research and published RPA benchmarks for manufacturing operations. Individual deployment results depend on baseline maturity, process scope, and integration complexity.
Manufacturing deployments typically integrate with ERP (SAP, Oracle, 1C), MES and shop-floor systems (SCADA, OPC), quality and LIMS systems, warehouse and logistics platforms, and supplier and customer EDI / portals.
Built on Orchestrator·Robot·AI Server. For deployment topology and security posture in plant environments, see architecture.