Case study
Factory management system
2026
Sunrise Ceramics
Sunrise Ceramics is a factory management system built for a ceramic cup manufacturer. It follows production through eleven steps, from clay milling to packed cartons, and ties that floor record to finished stock, orders, customer and supplier ledgers, and piece-rate wages. It runs offline as a Windows desktop app, in English and Urdu.
At a glance
Role
Full-stack design and development
Year
2026
Stack
- — Next.js
- — React
- — Tailwind CSS
- — Electron
- — Local-first storage
- — Hand-built SVG charts
Highlights
- — Eleven-step production line, clay to carton
- — Orders, ledgers and piece-rate wages
- — Offline Windows app in English and Urdu
The problem
A ceramics works does not count one thing. Before the kiln it counts greenware — shaped, unfired and worth nothing yet. After the kiln it counts graded cups. On the shelf it counts cartons, and a carton holds a different number of dozens depending on the size of cup inside it. Generic inventory software has one unit per item and no idea where that boundary falls.
Wages follow the same shape. Much of the floor is paid by the piece, at rates that differ by step, by cup size and by method, and those rates change over time. Worked out by hand from paper sheets, payroll is slow and easy to dispute.
The approach
The domain was modelled in the factory's own words. Each of the eleven steps carries its own unit, so a sheet before the kiln says greenware and packing says cartons without any screen knowing which side of the kiln it is on. Finished stock is counted by quality grade and carton size, because that is how the factory prices, sells and orders.
Balances are never stored. Stock on hand, what a customer owes and what is owed to a supplier are derived from their ledgers every time they are read, so any figure on screen traces back to the rows that produced it. Money is held in integer paisa, the price book and the piece-rate card are dated and append-only, and every change goes through one action layer that writes the audit log in the same pass.
Piece-rate wages come straight off the floor sheets a worker was named on, at the rate in force on the day the work was done. Payroll is drafted before anyone opens it, and only the exceptions get typed.
Built for the factory floor
A factory office cannot depend on the internet or a server. The system ships as a Windows installer and runs entirely on the machine, with records flushed to disk every twenty seconds and whenever the window loses focus, so a power cut costs the last few edits rather than the day. A JSON backup sits one click away in Settings.
It is fully bilingual. Switching to Urdu flips the entire interface right to left, while figures stay in Latin numerals reading left to right — the way Pakistani factory paperwork is actually written, and what keeps money columns scannable.