Your Whanganui glassworks runs on Xero, a whiteboard, and whatever the head gaffer remembers about the lehr
A custom ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for a Whanganui manufacturer or grower usually lands between NZ$85,000 and NZ$190,000, with the first production module in daily use inside 12 to 18 weeks. Across 2,000+ builds, the budget always goes to the two or three processes nobody else models: annealing schedules that change with piece thickness, grade-out in a packhouse, and consignment stock sitting in galleries you do not own.
You already have software. Xero handles GST and the wage run, a spreadsheet holds the production plan, and the annealing schedule lives in one person's head because a 40mm paperweight and a blown vessel do not cool the same way. NetSuite and SAP arrive priced for a company ten times your size. Microsoft Dynamics needs a partner in Auckland who bills travel to Whanganui. Odoo looks affordable right up until you open the manufacturing module and find it assumes a repeatable bill of materials.
Repeatability is the whole argument. A run of 200 wholesale tumblers and a commissioned one-off sculpture are the same business but not the same data model, and forcing both through a fixed BOM means inventing throwaway product codes that poison every report afterwards. Market gardens on the river flats hit the mirror image: a crop plan is a forecast, not a parts list, and the harvest comes back as grades rather than units.
Why the usual tools struggle in Whanganui
- Odoo's manufacturing module expects a fixed bill of materials, so every commission gets a fake product code and yield reporting becomes fiction
- Pieces on consignment at galleries in Whanganui, Palmerston North and Wellington are invisible in stock until a remittance turns up
- Cold shop seconds and cracked work are written off in a side spreadsheet, so true yield per firing is never actually known
- Per-user pricing on NetSuite and Dynamics punishes a packhouse crew that doubles in size for eight weeks and then goes home
What a custom ERP build changes
You are not buying features, you are buying a data model that matches how value gets made here. A custom ERP can treat a unique piece as a serialised item from the moment it leaves the glory hole, follow it through the lehr, the cold shop, photography and consignment, and still push a 200 unit wholesale run through the same order flow. It can also leave Xero in place as the ledger rather than replacing it, which in New Zealand is almost always the cheaper correct answer.
- You sell the same physical stock through a website, a market stall and Instagram and cannot state what is genuinely available right now
- Two or more people burn a full day each week reconciling spreadsheets against Xero
- Your highest margin work cannot be quoted without walking out and asking the person who makes it
- You are declining wholesale orders because you cannot commit to a delivery date
- Your manufacturing is repeat production with stable bills of materials and no consignment
- Under roughly NZ$3m turnover with straightforward stock, Odoo or a Cin7 Core plus Xero stack will cover you
- Nobody internally can own process decisions for the next six months
- Your real complaint is reporting rather than process, in which case start with dashboards and stop
- One record per unique piece from hot shop to gallery shelf, so you stop selling work that is physically sitting in Wellington
- Consignment revenue recognised when the gallery reports the sale, with 15% GST handled correctly on agent margin rather than gross
- Costing per firing instead of per month, so you can see which colour palette and which kiln schedule actually pay their way
- Role based access for seasonal packhouse and studio staff without buying a licence seat for eight weeks of work
- Clean data handover into /inventory-management-software/whanganui-mwt/ and /business-intelligence-dashboards/whanganui-mwt/ instead of another CSV export
- You own the roadmap and therefore the running cost, realistically NZ$1,500 to NZ$6,000 a month in retained development after go live
- There is no user forum to search at 9pm when something is confusing, only your documentation and your vendor's phone
- A 12 to 18 week build means a full growing or exhibition season runs on the old process while the new one is being made
- If your processes are genuinely standard, Odoo at a fraction of the price will beat a custom build and you should take that win
The features that matter for Whanganui
What we build under ERP in Whanganui
The engagements Whanganui teams bring us most often: distribution ERP, custom ERP modules, ERP API integration, ERP implementation, ERP integration and NetSuite customization.
ERP pricing in Whanganui: the real numbers
| Project scope | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Single module, consignment and serialised stock only | NZ$45,000 to NZ$80,000 | 8 to 12 weeks |
| Core ERP: production, stock, orders, Xero sync | NZ$85,000 to NZ$150,000 | 14 to 20 weeks |
| Multi-site with packhouse, wholesale and export | NZ$150,000 to NZ$240,000 | 24 to 36 weeks |
From kickoff to launch: the schedule
Exactly what you get
A working system, the code, and the reasoning behind both. Concretely: a serialised item register that handles editions and one-offs, a production and firing scheduler, a consignment ledger with automated invoicing, raw material tracking down to colour rods and glaze chemicals in kilograms, a Xero integration that reconciles rather than duplicates, and role based access that costs nothing extra when your summer crew arrives. You also get the migration itself, which for most Whanganui operators means five to fifteen years of spreadsheets cleaned, deduplicated and loaded with the pre-2015 Wanganui spellings reconciled against current records.
How to choose a developer in Whanganui
The local pool is small, so most serious builds here involve a Palmerston North, Wellington or offshore team. That is fine if discovery happens on site. Insist someone spends a day watching a firing cycle or a harvest pack, because the entire value of a custom ERP sits in details you cannot describe in a meeting room. Ask for two references in manufacturing or horticulture, not hospitality. Check they will hand over the repository, the deployment pipeline and the schema documentation on day one. Then ask directly what happens when the relationship ends, because a system nobody else can maintain is not an asset, it is a subscription with extra steps.
- !A fixed price quote before anyone has stood in the hot shop or watched a pack day. Ask for a paid discovery that ends with a written process map you own outright.
- !Demos running on a generic manufacturing template. Ask them to show one serialised unique item moving through consignment and back.
- !No named New Zealand finance experience. Ask how they have handled 15% GST, IRD payday filing and a live Xero sync before.
- !Vague answers on repository ownership. Ask for the git remote sitting in your organisation from week one, in the contract.
- !A team that will not name the monthly cost of keeping it alive. Ask for the support retainer figure before you sign anything.
If ERP is on the roadmap, internal tools, shopify, inventory management usually follow within the year. Budget them as one conversation. Weighing options across the region? We publish the same ERP guide for Palmerston North. Digital Heroes builds this in-house, see our ERP development service.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- 48% of private companies cite integration with legacy systems or technical debt as a top obstacle to realizing the full value of their digital and AI investments (behind data quality/availability at 72% and gaps in AI fluency or technology talent/leadership at 53%). Source: Deloitte (2026) →
- McKinsey found that tech debt can amount to 20-40% of the value of a company's entire technology estate before depreciation, and CIOs report that 10-20% of the budget for new products is diverted to resolving tech-debt issues. Source: McKinsey & Company (2020) →
- Brandon Hall Group research on onboarding reports that done well, structured onboarding drives measurable gains in new-hire productivity, employee engagement, and retention; the page notes 41% of organizations experience greater than 5% turnover among new hires. Source: Brandon Hall Group (2024) →
- Bersin by Deloitte research found organizations that use HR technology and employee-centric design to build a flexible, empowering workplace are more than 5 times more effective at improving employee engagement and retention than their peers, and 2.5 times more likely to reach 'high-impact' status by leveraging HR for digital transformation. Source: Bersin by Deloitte (2017) →
Vikram runs the engineering function at Digital Heroes, from how teams are structured to how code gets reviewed and released. He writes about the trade offs behind build decisions: what to buy, what to build, and where technical debt is worth taking on deliberately.
View profile · Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
What does a custom ERP actually cost for a Whanganui glass or ceramics studio?
A focused build covering serialised stock, consignment and Xero sync runs NZ$45,000 to NZ$80,000. A full production ERP including firing schedules, wholesale and purchasing sits at NZ$85,000 to NZ$150,000. Studios turning over under about NZ$1.5m are usually better served by a single module first, then extending once it earns its keep.
Can a custom ERP handle GST and still keep us on Xero?
Yes, and it should. The correct pattern is that the ERP owns operations and pushes invoices, bills and GST coded lines into Xero, which stays the source of truth for your 15% GST returns and IRD filing. Replacing the general ledger doubles the build cost and hands your accountant a system they have never seen.
How do we handle consignment stock sitting in galleries around the region?
Consignment gets its own location type in the data model, so a piece at a Whanganui or Wellington gallery is out of your studio but still yours. The system invoices only when the gallery reports a sale, calculates their commission, and flags anything sitting past 90 days so you can rotate it. This is the single most common reason Whanganui makers outgrow Odoo.
Will an ERP work for a market garden as well as a workshop?
It can, but only if it is scoped that way from the start. Growing needs crop blocks, planting windows, harvest grades and agrichemical records rather than bills of materials. If you run both a workshop and a growing operation, expect the second process model to add roughly NZ$25,000 to NZ$45,000 over a single discipline build.
How long before staff are actually using it?
First module in real use at 12 to 18 weeks, full cutover at 20 to 30 weeks for most Whanganui operators. We deliberately ship the module with the loudest pain first, usually stock or consignment, so the business gets relief long before the whole system is finished.
Do we own the code?
You should own everything: source code, database schema, deployment configuration and documentation, held in a repository under your own organisation. Get it written into the contract before work starts. Any developer who resists this is selling you a dependency rather than software.
What happens to our old data, including records spelled Wanganui?
Migration is a real work stream, not an afterthought. Records from before the 2015 spelling change routinely create duplicate customers, duplicate suppliers and split sales history, so the migration includes fuzzy matching, manual review of collisions and a rollback point. Budget 10 to 20 percent of the project for it.
Can we hire someone locally to maintain it afterwards?
Whanganui has capable developers through its design and tech community, but the pool for enterprise-grade maintenance is thin. Build on a mainstream stack rather than anything exotic so a Palmerston North or Wellington developer can pick it up. Ask your vendor to write the handover documentation as a contracted deliverable, not a favour.
Is Odoo ever the right answer for a Whanganui manufacturer?
Often, yes. If you run repeat production with stable recipes, no consignment and no unique pieces, Odoo plus a good implementation partner beats a custom build on both price and time. The moment quantity-one items or gallery consignment enter the picture, the workarounds start costing more than the licence ever saved.
Is a custom ERP cheaper than NetSuite over five years?
What tech stack should a custom ERP be built on?
How many developers does it take to build an ERP?
How much should a small business budget for its first custom app or website?
Is SAP overkill for a mid-sized company?
How many SaaS seats do we need before building custom becomes cheaper?
Who can build custom ERP software for a business in Whanganui?
Digital Heroes builds custom ERP software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, so an operator in Whanganui gets an assigned senior team rather than a local account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other ERP software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
