Quotes had been managed for years in an application built on top of a content management system. The database held 127 tables, the vast majority belonging to the CMS itself — with the company's business logic living in a handful of tables attached to the side.

Everything else sat outside it: capacity planning, assembly journals, employee records. The system could manage quotes and nothing more.

A job now has one system end to end: enquiry, preliminary quote, final quote, order, calendar planning, assembly journal, customer signature on a tablet, handover protocol.

What had nowhere to live before now does: a work backlog assigned to the calendar by dragging, a shop-floor monitor, electronic signatures, and an HR intranet with a noticeboard, employee cards and surveys.

Access runs on eleven roles and around a hundred permissions — from foreman and purchaser to storekeeper and payroll clerk. Everyone sees their part of the system and nothing else.

The migration carried across companies, customers, the price list, quotes and their history, plus over three and a half gigabytes of attachments reattached to the right records. The old system did not have to be kept alive just in case.

The system keeps growing — it has been through more than a hundred database migrations since launch.