From Paper to Platform: 10 Production Stages and 7 QC Gates Unified on Salesforce

The client is a leading precision medical equipment manufacturer.

A precision medical equipment manufacturer replaced paper ISO forms and spreadsheets with one real-time system covering everything from gate entry to dispatch.

Client & Project Overview

The client is a leading precision medical equipment manufacturer that designs and builds laboratory and clinical optical microscopes entirely in-house; machining and assembling every mechanical, optical, electrical, and liquid component on-site. Its instruments serve the education, life sciences, and medical diagnostics markets, and the business operates under ISO-governed quality standards with inspections required at every major production stage.

This is genuinely complex manufacturing. A single microscope is built from a six-level bill of materials the full hierarchy of a product, from the finished model down through assemblies, parts, and raw materials sourced through four different procurement routes, including in-house CNC machining and outsourced vendor work.

Yet the entire operation ran on paper ISO formats, Excel spreadsheets, and verbal updates. Leadership could not reliably answer one simple question at any moment: what is on the floor right now, where is it, and why is it stuck?

Challenges and How We Solved Them

1. Material arrived and vanished into paperwork. Goods came in against paper logs with no timestamps, no photo evidence, and no matching against purchase orders, discrepancies surfaced days later, usually when production ran short. We built a mobile-accessible digital gate entry with automatic timestamps and photo capture, linked receipts directly to purchase orders, and auto-flagged quantity mismatches on arrival.

2. Work orders were released with no idea whether stock existed. Production planning lived in Excel with no material-availability check, so orders repeatedly stalled mid-run when parts ran out. We replaced this with BOM-driven work orders that enforce a hard availability check, no order can be released against insufficient stock.

3. Nothing on the shop floor was traceable. Quality checks were verbal, work-in-process parts sat without batch identity, scrap went unrecorded, and if a finished instrument failed, there was no way to trace it back to the material batch, machine, or operator a direct risk in ISO audits. We introduced barcode-based tracking across stores and work-in-process, digital work orders with operator sign-off and scrap reason codes, and end-to-end lot tracking with one-click trace from finished product back to supplier invoice.

4. Four outsourced processes were invisible. Paint, nickel plating, anodising, and optical coating were tracked informally, if at all. We built a dedicated job-work workflow with dispatch and return dates, turnaround-time SLA alerts, and quality inspection on return.

Solution & Delivery

Avanciers implemented Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud across the client’s core production process: gate entry, material receipt, incoming inspection, raw stores, production, surface finishing, WIP stores, final checks, assembly, and packing & dispatch.

The approach was deliberately process-first: rather than forcing a generic CRM onto a factory, all ten manufacturing stages were mapped, and a specific Salesforce capability was configured to close the specific gap at each one. Seven quality-control gates were built into the flow as hard digital checkpoints material cannot advance without a digital sign-off, and a failed inspection automatically raises a rework order or holds the batch.

The rollout was phased to make adoption easier: core manufacturing first, with finance, HR, and sales sequenced later. Starting with the highest-pain, highest-visibility stage delivered demonstrable value fastest.

Results & Impact

• 10 production stages unified on a single platform, from gate to dispatch

• 7 QC gates enforced as hard digital checkpoints, making inspection records audit-ready by default
• 4 outsourced vendor processes fully tracked, with SLAs and quality gates closing a major blind spot
• Real-time, end-to-end visibility for leadership replacing week-old spreadsheets and verbal updates
• Mid-run stoppages designed out through enforced material-availability checks before any work order is released
• One-click traceability from finished instrument back to raw-material batch, machine, and operator turning ISO audits and root-cause analysis from a scramble into a query

Running complex manufacturing on paper and spreadsheets?

Talk to us about what a single, connected view of your production floor could look like.