Executive Summary

Millions of mid-market manufacturers—an estimated 1,500,000 globally—still run critical shop-floor processes through Excel and ad-hoc paper workflows, creating chronic data latency, quality errors, and lost throughput. Plant supervisors and line operators face steep retraining costs when traditional ERP interfaces change, and corporate IT teams struggle to reconcile fragmented spreadsheets with finance systems, contributing to avoidable downtime and decision delays. The product to pursue is an AI-driven manufacturing ERP that combines a natural-language LLM interface for frontline users, turnkey IIoT edge integrations for real-time telemetry, and pre-built automation templates for common shop-floor workflows. Key capabilities would include conversational work instructions, automated data capture from sensors and PLCs, predictive maintenance signals at the edge, and low-code orchestration so customers can cut manual entry and rework materially without replacing all existing systems. This is an attractive moment: the addressable market is roughly $60.0B if mid-market ERP and automation spend averages $40K ACV across 1.5M manufacturers, and the market score and revenue potential are high (92/100 and 88/100) because cloud modernization, cheap sensors, and LLM-enabled UX lower both cost and adoption friction. Technological enablers—affordable edge compute for IIoT and accessible LLMs—mean a solution that was once prohibitively expensive can now scale to hundreds or thousands of factories with acceptable TCO. To stand out you must combine deep manufacturing domain models with robust integrations to PLCs and legacy ERPs, offer human-in-the-loop validation for edge predictions, and focus on rapid time-to-value through role-based conversational UX; those are defensible differentiators beyond generic cloud ERP vendors. The challenges are real: a medium level of competition, long sales cycles (often 6–12 months), complex integration work, and the need to prove reliability in safety- and regulation-sensitive environments, so early wins with reference customers and a repeatable deployment playbook will be critical.

Market Opportunity

Factory stuck on Excel — AI-driven manufacturing ERP to automate shop floor targets a $60.0B = 1,500,000 manufacturers globally x $40K ACV (global ERP + automation spend) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 8% CAGR (ERP/manufacturing software market).

Key trends driving demand: LLM-enabled workflows -- natural-language interfaces let shop-floor staff interact with ERP without retraining, accelerating adoption.; IIoT edge compute -- cheap sensors and edge ML enable real-time telemetry and predictive maintenance previously too costly.; Cloud ERP modernization -- mid-market is replacing legacy on-prem systems with cloud-native stacks to reduce ops cost and speed integrations.; Composable SaaS & APIs -- API-first modules make prebuilt integrations and faster time-to-value possible for verticalized ERPs..

Key competitors include SAP (S/4HANA / Business One), Oracle NetSuite, Odoo, Plex (now Rockwell Automation Plex), Excel + QuickBooks / Manual Processes (workaround).

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Factory stuck on Excel — AI-driven manufacturing ERP to automate shop floor

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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