Why it exists
Most shop management software was written a long time ago by people who had never run a job. You can tell. The screens are dense in the wrong places, the schedule is an afterthought, and the fastest way to find out what's running on a machine is still to walk over and look.
So shops work around it. The schedule migrates to a whiteboard. Job status lives in one person's head. Stock is a spreadsheet somebody maintains out of goodwill. None of that is a failure of the people — it's what happens when the software is slower than the workaround.
Every module here started as a problem someone had that afternoon, not a line item on a feature list.
How it's built
This system has been written alongside real jobs — steam valve components, high-temp fasteners, the kind of work that comes with heat numbers and certificates and a customer who won't take delivery without them. When something on the floor was slow or annoying, that became the next thing to fix.
That's a genuinely different starting point from an ERP designed around an accounting ledger and extended outwards until it reaches production. The schedule came first here, because on a shop floor the schedule is what everything else hangs off.
Where it's up to
SDG Solutions is early, and there's no reason to pretend otherwise. The system is built and running — quoting, scheduling, shop floor tracking, quality and traceability, inventory, purchasing, and job costing are all there and working. What it's doing now is going into its first shops.
That stage has a real advantage for the shops that come on early: the software still bends around how you work, rather than the other way round. If something doesn't fit the way your floor actually runs, that's a conversation, not a support ticket that closes as "working as designed".
What you'd be dealing with
One person, based in Sydney, who knows what a setup sheet is and why a job with a missing mill cert can't ship. No sales team, no offshore support queue, no implementation partner to pay separately. You'd get a straight answer about whether this fits your shop — including if it doesn't.