Software for precast concrete that connects the office to the floor
We build software for managing precast concrete production. Not from a slide deck, from the shop floor. We are deploying our Relay system at a precast producer in Sanok, Poland, so we know first-hand where this industry loses orders, hours and material.
It's one pillar of our broader production management system for make-to-order manufacturers.
A problem every precast plant recognises
Orders reach a precast plant in every format imaginable. A PDF exported from accounting software, an Excel sheet, an email from sales, sometimes a note left on a desk. The office retypes all of it by hand and hands it to the floor by phone or on a printout. By the time a job reaches the mould, it has passed through several hands and several scraps of paper. Every one of those hops is a place where something falls through.
The floor brings the second half of the problem. A foreman can't tell at a glance which job is urgent and which can wait until tomorrow. Concrete runs out, reinforcement is missing, or no mould is free, so he calls the office, the office calls someone else, and production stands idle in the meantime. Notes go missing, the same order hits the floor twice, and month-end turns into reconstructing the truth from memory and printouts.
Shift planning becomes guesswork at that point. The owner phones the floor just to learn what's actually finished. The client report is assembled by hand from a handful of sources. We saw all of this up close when we walked into the plant in Sanok. The problem isn't the people. It's that the office and the floor run on two separate information loops that never meet.
What we built into Relay
Relay is our system for managing precast concrete production. It joins the office and the floor into a single loop, from order intake to the pickup of a finished element. We designed it around three views, because that's how a day in a precast plant actually splits.
In the Office view you create and run orders. Each one carries a priority (normal, urgent or stop), a material list and a status (queue, in progress, done). Nothing lives only in someone's head anymore.
In the Production view the floor sees its own jobs on a tablet or a large wall screen. A new order shows up the moment the office saves it, over WebSocket, with no refresh and no phone call. We split production into a rebar section and a concrete section, each with its own status, because they're two different fronts of work.
The Import module loads many orders at once. CSV, TSV and Excel files, plus pasted text, parse right in the browser, with a preview and a check on every line before anything is saved. You don't have to change how you take orders today. We take your files as they are.
The detail that matters most to the floor is shortage reporting. When concrete runs low, reinforcement is missing, or no mould is free, a worker flags it with a single click and the alert reaches the office that same second. On top of that sit the Clients, Pickup, Production Reports and Supervisor panels, where in-progress jobs are tracked, reports get approved and a STOP gets escalated, plus Warehouse and an Archive with a monthly summary of completed production. Every employee signs in with their own PIN and sees only the views for their station, modules are switched on in settings when the plant needs them, and the floor view has a TV mode for a large screen.
Underneath, we guard two things that make all the difference on a working floor. The connection to the floor screen is authenticated by session, kept alive with a signal every 30 seconds, and reconnects on its own when the WiFi drops for a moment. Changes to a single order are written inside a transaction with a row lock, so the office and the floor never overwrite each other's status or material list. These aren't decorations. They're the difference between a board the floor trusts and one more thing somebody has to verify by phone.
What has already changed at the plant in Sanok
A precast producer in Sanok is Relay's first deployment, and we're still rolling it out. The office already works on the system, and the floor view on a tablet and screen will start once the plant connects the hardware on the production floor. We didn't promise percentages up front, because honestly we didn't have them. So here's what has already changed on the office side.
- The office loads orders from Excel or pasted text in seconds, rather than retyping them line by line.
- Every order sits in one system, with a priority and a status, instead of in emails, PDFs and on paper notes.
- The owner sees in one place which orders are in and what their priority is, without reconstructing the state from paper notes.
- Notes stopped going missing in the office, and the same order no longer enters the system twice.
These are qualitative gains, and we present them as exactly that. Hard numbers we gather together with the client on the floor, instead of typing invented metrics here. If you build software for this industry, you already know a number pulled from thin air won't survive the first conversation with a floor manager. We'll switch on the live floor view there once the hardware arrives on the production floor, and only then will we describe it as a working fact rather than a promise.
How we roll it out for you
We start with your order flow. We look at the formats orders arrive in and how they reach production today.
Then we map the floor, which means agreeing on sections, priorities and who approves what.
Next we load your data through the import module, with no retyping.
We bring up the floor view on a tablet or screen, with live updates.
After launch, we stay. Fixes, new fields and reports get added as we go, because every precast plant works a little differently and no template covers that on its own.
The code is yours, in your repository, from day one. No per-seat licensing and no lock-in to us.
Straight answers
Q.1How is this different from an ERP or a spreadsheet?
An ERP handles invoices and inventory but rarely sees the floor in real time. A spreadsheet won't shout when the concrete runs out. Relay sits squarely between the office and production and shows an order's status where the element is actually made. We connect it to your ERP or accounting through import and export, so you throw nothing away.
Q.2Our orders live in Excel and emails. Can you load that?
Yes, that's what the import module is for. It takes CSV, TSV and Excel files plus pasted text, shows a preview and checks every line before saving. You don't change how you take orders today.
Q.3Does it work on a floor with weak WiFi?
Yes. The floor screen connects over a WebSocket that reconnects on its own after a drop, and a signal every 30 seconds keeps the view from freezing. Orders don't vanish when the network blinks.
Q.4How long does it take and what does it cost?
We stood Relay up in four weeks. A rollout for a new plant is quoted at a fixed price after a short audit of your order flow, in writing before we start. No hourly billing and no invoices for things we never agreed on.
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