Hire Fractional CTO for Manufacturing
Senior, direct, no layers

A manufacturer usually loses time in quoting and scheduling. A request for quote waits while engineering checks a bill of materials, production waits while a schedule is rebuilt around a late material delivery, and sales quotes a lead time that the shop floor cannot meet because the schedule lives in a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts. Meanwhile distributors and dealers order by phone or email, spare-parts orders arrive without part numbers, and quality records sit in binders that cannot be searched when a customer asks for traceability.

A fractional CTO provides senior technology leadership part-time: setting technical direction, choosing systems, overseeing vendors and builds, and making sure technology spending serves the business rather than accumulating into a tangle. For a manufacturer, fractional CTO time is usually spent on ERP and shop-floor system decisions, because the ERP choice constrains quoting, scheduling and traceability together.

Engagements are senior-only and direct: one person owns the work, the scope is fixed before build, and progress is shown against real jobs from your operation, not demo data. The starting point is a short discovery conversation about how manufacturing handle quoting, bills of materials, production scheduling, quality checks and order fulfilment today. Book a free discovery call and we will test the fit before any scope is agreed.

The systems a manufacturer actually runs are the ERP at the centre and the shop-floor tools around it. That means SAP S/4HANA or Oracle NetSuite for larger operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for the mid-market, and Epicor or Plex for plants that need deeper production control. Smaller shops run Fishbowl, Katana or MRPeasy for inventory and production, with SolidWorks or AutoCAD on the engineering side and Salesforce or HubSpot for sales. Lot and serial traceability, where it matters, lives in the ERP or the quality system, not in a spreadsheet.

Work that ignores the ERP creates a second set of books, and the shop floor stops trusting it within weeks. So any build starts by mapping which system owns the bill of materials, which owns inventory, and which owns the order. Customer-facing ordering, distributor portals and spare-parts stores read stock and lead-time data from the ERP, quote tools read routings and material costs from the same source, and quality or traceability records are written back where auditors will look for them. ISO 9001 documentation habits shape how records are kept, even where formal certification is not in scope.

The work is advisory and hands-on in equal measure: architecture decisions, vendor evaluation, security and data practices, and direct oversight of development work the company commissions. The work is scoped so it fits those systems rather than competing with them, and so the team that runs quoting, bills of materials, production scheduling, quality checks and order fulfilment can keep working while it is built.

Outcomes to expect. Realistic outcomes are steadier operations rather than sudden transformation: quotes that go out with real material and routing costs behind them, schedules that reflect actual material availability, distributor orders that arrive with correct part numbers, and traceability answers that take a search instead of a day in the archive. Direct and dealer channels also stop competing on price alone once product and lead-time information is accurate in both places.