Global Shop Solutions Alternatives: 8 Options, Priced

Key Terms

First-pass yield: the percentage of parts that pass quality inspection without rework; AI-driven process monitoring identifies drift before it produces scrap. ERP-to-shop-floor gap: the disconnect between what the ERP system plans and what actually happens on the production floor; custom AI bridges this gap by integrating real-time machine data with scheduling logic. Bill of material reconciliation: automated comparison of engineering BOMs against purchasing records and shop floor consumption to catch substitutions, shortages, and cost overruns before they compound. Estimating accuracy: the variance between quoted cost and actual cost on completed jobs; AI-assisted estimating narrows this gap by learning from historical job data rather than relying on estimator memory.

Two vendors in this comparison publish a real, checkable rate card on their own website. The rest do not, and the incumbent is one of the ones that does not. We label each figure VERIFIED when the named page was opened directly and read on August 27, 2026, and REPORTED when it reached us through a search aggregation without an independent fetch of that specific page. VERIFIED does not mean vendor confirmed. Several VERIFIED numbers below are third party estimates that we read first hand rather than relayed. Where two sources disagree we print both rather than choosing the one that flatters the argument, and where we found nothing we leave the cell honest instead of filling it.

The thing that is missing from that table, and why it matters

There is no row anywhere above for the incumbent's own published price, because there is not one. Every public figure we could find on August 27, 2026 is a third party estimate rather than a vendor rate card: ERP Research, ITQlick, SaaSworthy, Top10ERP, G2. The vendor's own blog post about what determines the cost of the software states no figures. That is not an oversight in a category this mature, it is a pricing strategy, and the practical consequence for you is that every number the sales team quotes is quoted against you rather than against a rate card. It also means the single most valuable document in this entire decision is your own order form, which nobody on the internet can read for you.

Two more gaps we are naming rather than filling. Global Shop Solutions publishes no contract term, no renewal mechanics and no escalation clause that we could find from the vendor or from any aggregator, so we are printing none and you should pull your own agreement. And Fulcrum, which is genuinely one of the more interesting names on this list, cannot be priced without a sales call, which is worth recognising as the same pattern rather than an exception to it. Custom AI builds: what we commission and what it costs shows the same discipline applied to our own fixed fee.

Normalise it: one year for a 15 seat shop

Per seat and per firm pricing are not comparable until you fix the headcount. Hold one shop at 15 seats, 10 office and engineering plus 5 on the floor, take each vendor's published or reported rate at face value with nothing negotiated and no add-on modules, and ask what a single year of recurring cost looks like.

Read that table honestly and the first thing it says is that Global Shop Solutions at the low end of its reported range is not the expensive option. It is the third cheapest recurring line in the comparison, and the two products below it are a leaner ERP and a lighter MRP tool. If your order form says $100 a seat, the case for switching ERPs to save money is weak and you should spend your energy on the renewal conversation instead. The pressure only becomes real at the middle and top of the reported range, which is where every reviewer complaint in this category is coming from.

The three year and five year model

One year is the wrong horizon for a decision that lasts a decade. The model below adds the one time implementation fee in year one and escalates the recurring line 3 percent a year from year two. The 3 percent escalation is our modelling assumption, applied identically to every recurring product so nobody is advantaged, and it is deliberately low; enterprise software renewals frequently run higher. Every recurring vendor is held at the low end of its published or reported range, which is conservative in the incumbent's favour rather than stacked against it. No add-on modules, no multi site and no heavy customisation are included for anyone. The custom build is modelled at $15,000, the low end of our own range, with a 15 percent a year maintenance assumption and no escalation, because fixed fee maintenance does not carry per seat uplift.

Three findings in that table are inconvenient for us and we are printing them first. Cetec ERP is cheaper than the cheapest build we would scope at both the one year and three year horizons, at $52,291 against $21,750, and it only loses the comparison partway through year five, at about 4.3 years, when the $15,000 build's flat maintenance line finally undercuts Cetec's escalating subscription. A build at $100,000 never becomes cheaper than the conservative Global Shop Solutions scenario, not at five years and not at ten, where the subscription reaches $226,350 and the build reaches $250,000. A build at $50,000 loses against every scenario in the table, including the high end incumbent case, at every horizon we modelled. If someone tells you a custom build is always cheaper than an ERP subscription, they have not run this arithmetic.

The thresholds are the genuinely useful output. Back solving the same formula, a build has to come in under about $52,163 to beat the low end Global Shop Solutions scenario over three years, under $66,037 over five, and under $90,540 over ten. Against a shop paying the midpoint of the reported range those thresholds rise to about $71,348, $93,341 and $131,810. Against the top of the range they rise again to about $90,533, $120,645 and $173,080. That is the honest test to apply to any build quote you receive, ours included.

Cumulative spend for the same 15 seat shop, five years out. Global Shop Solutions at the low end of its reported range, $100 a seat, with $20,000 implementation paid at year zero and a 3 percent annual escalation from year two. Against it, two build lines rather than one, because a single flattering line would be the same trick the directory pages play: a build at $15,000, the low end of our fee range, and a build at $100,000, near the middle of it. Both carry 15 percent a year maintenance. Every figure in the chart comes from the table above.

The crossover for the $15,000 build lands at about 2.2 years, roughly $59,600 of cumulative spend on each path. Before that point the subscription is cheaper and the build is a worse financial decision, which is exactly what you would expect and exactly what most vendor comparison charts hide by starting the axis in a convenient place. After that point the gap widens every year, because one line has a slope and the other is nearly flat. At year five the difference is $36,814, and nothing in the model bends the subscription line back down.

The dotted line is the more important one. A $100,000 build against this same conservative incumbent scenario does not cross within five years, and extending the model to ten years does not save it either: the subscription reaches $226,350 while the build reaches $250,000. It only starts winning if your actual Global Shop Solutions cost is higher than the low end we modelled. Against a shop paying the midpoint of the reported range, a $100,000 build crosses during year six. Against a shop paying the top of the range, it crosses during year four. This is why the first question on the audit call is what your invoice actually says, and why the calculator below defaults to your numbers rather than ours. The Epicor Kinetic AI playbook runs the same crossover logic against a different incumbent.

Every default below is a figure from the table above, and every one is editable, because the defaults are a market estimate and your order form is a fact. Nothing is submitted anywhere. There is no email gate, no external request, no stored value. The arithmetic runs in your browser and stops there. If your inputs make the build lose, the tool says so in plain words rather than quietly hiding the result.

One note on the roster before the list. Most of the public shortlists for this software are software directory listicles, and several of them mix enterprise suites, niche European tools and light MRP apps into a single undifferentiated top thirty with no pricing and no explanation of which fits which shop. One of them lists an unrelated European product alongside NetSuite as though a 12 person machine shop should evaluate both. The list below covers the systems Global Shop Solutions actually competes against for a 10 to 30 user job shop, in the order a shop holding that contract would sensibly evaluate them.

1. Cetec ERP

What it is. A full manufacturing ERP covering quoting, orders, production, inventory, purchasing and accounting, sold on a flat per user subscription with every module included at every tier. Deliberately standardised rather than deeply customisable.

Price. VERIFIED from cetecerp.com/monthly-pricing on August 27, 2026. $50 per standard user per month with a five user minimum, $25 per shop floor user, $20 per month for portal users. Support plans are $650 a month for Standard or $3,200 for Enterprise, with community forum support included free. No implementation fee is published; the site states the subscription includes cloud hosting and setup. This is the most complete and most checkable rate card of any full ERP in this comparison.

Best for. Shops under about 25 users that want a real ERP with a price they can budget against without a sales cycle, and shops whose current pain is genuinely the invoice rather than a missing capability.

Where it falls short. It is leaner and more standardised than Global Shop Solutions, which is the entire reason it is cheaper. If your shop depends on custom screens, custom reports and modules built over a decade, Cetec is not a like for like replacement and pretending otherwise would cost you the project. The $650 a month support plan is close to half the cost of a 15 seat licence, so read the free forum support tier carefully before you assume it away.

Verdict. The cheapest credible full ERP here and the one most likely to genuinely reduce your bill. In our model it beats even the cheapest build we would scope until about 4.3 years.

2. JobBOSS2 / E2 Shop System

What it is. The other long standing job shop ERP name, now under ECI Software Solutions. Quoting, scheduling, job costing and shop floor data collection, aimed squarely at the same machine shops and fabricators.

Price. REPORTED at $200 per user per month with implementation from $5,000, from vendor pricing pages cited in our own build queue and not re-fetched in this pass. That is the cheapest implementation sticker on this list and the most expensive per seat rate.

Best for. Shops that want to stay inside the same category and same product shape, with a lower entry cost to get started.

Where it falls short. Reviewers describe module and add-on growth after signing, which is the same complaint pattern the incumbent draws. At 15 seats our model puts it at $196,129 over five years, materially above Global Shop Solutions at the low end of its range, so it is not a cost escape unless your current rate is high.

Verdict. A lateral move. Worth a quote if you already know your Global Shop Solutions rate is near the top of the reported range, otherwise it changes the vendor without changing the disease.

3. Fulcrum

What it is. A modern cloud native manufacturing platform positioned explicitly as a replacement for this generation of job shop ERP. The most interesting product on this list from a user experience standpoint and the one shops mention when they want something that does not look like it was designed in 2003.

Price. REPORTED only, and we are not printing a number. Multiple sources agree on the structure, a subscription plus a one time fixed implementation fee that scales with revenue and integration count, and none of them publishes a figure. One caution worth stating: the same name belongs to an unrelated field data collection product from a different company at $43 to $55 per user per month. That is a different product and it should never be used as a Fulcrum benchmark.

Best for. Shops where adoption is the constraint, where the current system is technically fine and nobody on the floor will use it.

Where it falls short. You cannot evaluate it on cost without a sales call, which puts it in exactly the same opacity bucket as the incumbent you are trying to leave. Do not let a better interface talk you out of asking for the year three number in writing.

Verdict. Genuinely worth a demo. Not worth a decision until someone puts a total on paper.

4. Epicor Kinetic

What it is. The most direct like for like alternative, and the name that appears alongside Global Shop Solutions on more competitor lists than any other. A mature, full featured manufacturing ERP for discrete and mixed mode manufacturers.

Price. REPORTED, and the sources contradict each other on the pricing model itself. One reports $1,500 a month base plus $100 to $200 per user. Another reports $80 to $250 per user with a typical $150 and no base fee at all. A 10 user minimum is commonly cited. Implementation is commonly cited at $75,000 to $300,000 for a standard mid market deployment. We show the first model in the calculator and name the second here rather than averaging two incompatible structures into a number that describes neither.

Best for. Larger, more complex manufacturers, particularly mixed mode shops running both make to order and repetitive production, and shops that need an ecosystem of partners and integrations around the ERP.

Where it falls short. It is a packaged enterprise ERP with sales call pricing and a large implementation cost. On our model it is the most expensive option in the comparison at $266,129 over five years, driven mostly by the reported implementation range. Switching here does not escape the pattern that brought you to this page, it changes the logo on the invoice.

Verdict. The right answer for a genuinely complex manufacturer that has outgrown a job shop ERP. The wrong answer for a 15 person shop looking to cut a bill.

5. Acumatica Manufacturing Edition

What it is. A cloud ERP whose distinguishing feature is its licensing model: you pay for resource consumption rather than seats, and users are unlimited.

Price. REPORTED at $25,000 to $100,000 a year base before implementation, with implementation from $20,000 for a basic rollout to $500,000 or more for complex manufacturing, and a market average of $50,000 to $150,000. All via aggregation, not read off Acumatica's own page in this pass.

Best for. Shops with high headcount relative to transaction volume, seasonal labour, or a lot of occasional users who need visibility but not daily use. If you are refusing to buy seats for people who should have access, this model is aimed at you.

Where it falls short. A sub 20 person job shop pays enterprise grade base pricing without enough users to make the unlimited model pay off. At 15 seats our model puts it at $152,728 over five years, well above the low end incumbent scenario. The consumption based pricing is also harder to forecast than a seat count, which is a real disadvantage if your volumes swing.

Verdict. A genuine structural alternative to per seat pricing, and structurally wrong for a small shop.

6. NetSuite

What it is. The enterprise cloud suite. Its real strength is multi subsidiary and multi entity financial consolidation, with manufacturing capability added through modules.

Price. REPORTED at $999 a month base plus $99 to $199 per user per month, recently trending toward $129, with manufacturing modules including WIP and Routing, Advanced Manufacturing and Quality Management adding $500 to $2,500 a month on top. Implementation is reported at $25,000 to $750,000, and first year all in is commonly cited from $25,000 for a small simple deployment to $250,000 or more for a complex one.

Best for. Manufacturers with multiple legal entities, multiple sites, or a serious financial consolidation requirement. If your CFO's hardest week is closing across three companies, this is the product built for that.

Where it falls short. Most shops switching off Global Shop Solutions are single site and single entity, which means paying for consolidation capability they will never use. Our model puts it at $211,924 over five years before a single manufacturing module, and the manufacturing modules are not optional for a job shop.

Verdict. The wrong shape of product for the buyer this page is written for, and the right one for a manufacturer whose complexity is financial rather than operational.

7. Katana MRP

What it is. A cloud inventory and production management tool. Clean, modern, genuinely well liked, and honest about what it is.

Price. VERIFIED from katanamrp.com/pricing on August 27, 2026. A free plan up to 30 SKUs. Core from $299 a month with unlimited SKUs and users at one location, billed additionally by sales order volume and per extra location. Add-ons are $199 a month for Manufacturing Management, $249 for Traceability and $149 for Warehouse Management. Onboarding is an optional $2,000 package. A fully loaded Core setup is REPORTED at roughly $747 to $1,095 a month by a third party breakdown we did not independently verify.

Best for. Light assembly, make to stock, and product companies with a bill of material and a warehouse. It is the cheapest line in our whole model at $21,049 over five years, and for the right company that is a real answer.

Where it falls short. It is not a job shop ERP and it does not claim to be. Multi level routing, work order costing against collected shop floor time, and the quoting complexity a machine shop or contract manufacturer runs on are not what this product does. If you are running Global Shop Solutions today for the reasons people run it, Katana is a downgrade dressed as a saving. We are including it because it appears on the competing lists and someone needs to say plainly who it is and is not for.

Verdict. Right product, usually wrong buyer for this page. Verify it handles your routing depth before the price tempts you.

8. A commissioned build you own

What it is. In most cases, not a replacement for your ERP. A custom system built for the workflow no ERP covers, sitting alongside whichever ERP you keep, owned by the shop at handoff. In practice that means parsing specs and drawings out of customer PDFs into a structured quote, automated quoting and costing against your real historical job data, capacity and promise date visibility, supplier and bill of material reconciliation, or inspection and quality assistance.

Price. One fixed fee from $10,000, quoted after the $499 AI-Ready Audit once the integration depth is named, with a working prototype on your data before payment. A working prototype runs on your real data in seven to ten days before any payment. Production build is five to seven weeks. The shop owns the code, prompts, models and pipeline at handoff and runs it in its own cloud tenant (a private cloud account).

Best for. Shops in the 10 to 30 user band with an ERP that basically works and one named workflow that burns estimator, scheduler or engineering hours every week, where the hours have a dollar figure attached.

Where it falls short. It is a bigger single cheque, it needs a tighter scope than buying software does, and at the middle and top of our range it loses the cost argument outright against a shop paying the low end for its ERP, as the chart above shows without softening it. It also does not replace your ERP, so if what you want is to stop paying Global Shop Solutions entirely, this is not that and Cetec probably is.

Verdict. The option nobody in the table above will show you, the only one where the bill stops going up, and the one you should apply the hardest arithmetic to.

Each of these is either arithmetic you can check on this page or a structural fact about the two models. Where an argument does not honestly apply to your shop, the section after this one says so.

One. The math, restated with its limits. A subscription never ends. At the low end of the reported range a 15 seat shop pays $75,636 over three years and $115,564 over five, and year six starts at zero progress. A $15,000 build costs $21,750 over the same three years and $26,250 over five, and the lines cross at about 2.2 years. The limit is the part most pages leave out: at $100,000 the build never catches that same conservative subscription inside ten years. The argument is real and it is conditional, and both halves of that sentence matter.

Two. Per seat pricing taxes headcount. Every hire raises the bill by the same rate whether or not that hire generates proportional revenue in year one, and on a shop floor the seats include terminals, which means the tax lands again every time you add a cell or a shift. Five new seats at $150 is $9,000 a year, added automatically, forever, with no decision made by anyone. An owned system has no marginal seat cost at all, so hiring stops carrying a software decision inside it.

Three. Asset versus expense. A subscription is rent and it leaves nothing behind. A commissioned build is a piece of the business: transferable, valuable in a sale or succession conversation, and on the balance sheet rather than only on the expense line. In a category where a meaningful share of shops are owner operated and heading toward a transition, that difference is not cosmetic.

Four. Built around your shop, not the median shop. Every product in the roundup above is calibrated against the average customer in its category, which means you pay for the whole feature bundle and adapt your process to the fraction of it you actually use. A commissioned system starts from your routings, your work centres, your estimating logic and your customers' drawing formats. Nobody gets retrained into someone else's assumptions.

Five. AI at the core rather than as a per seat add-on. The pattern in this category is that AI arrives as a premium module or a per seat uplift on the existing licence, which means the capability everyone now expects becomes a second subscription stacked on the first, priced against your headcount. We are labelling this as the category pattern rather than quoting a Global Shop Solutions AI price, because Global Shop Solutions publishes no pricing at all and we are not going to invent one for its AI either. In a commissioned build the AI is the system, there is no separate AI licence, and adding a user costs nothing.

Six. Unlimited seats. Office staff, estimators, every terminal on the floor, seasonal and second shift people, and where appropriate customers checking their own order status. Zero marginal cost per person changes the question from who needs a licence to who needs access, which is a better question and usually a more profitable one.

Seven. Data ownership and no exit ransom. Your job history, your costing data, your traceability records, in your own cloud tenant, under an agreement you wrote. Compare that with the migration section below, where the hard part of leaving an ERP is not the item master (the ERP's master list of every part and product), it is the lot and serial traceability (tracking each batch or unit back to its source and history) and the job costing history, both of which live in a structure the vendor designed. Owning the structure takes the negotiation out of leaving.

Eight. Vendor risk you stop carrying. Acquisitions, consolidation and forced upgrades are normal in manufacturing software. E2 Shop System became JobBOSS2 under a new corporate parent. Products in this category get bought, rebranded, repriced and eventually sunset (discontinued by the vendor) on the acquirer's calendar rather than yours, and shops that chose them migrate on someone else's schedule. A system you own does not get sunset by anybody, and the only rebuild pressure it carries is the one you choose.

Nine. Change speed. A change request to your own system is a scoping conversation and a deployment. A change request to an ERP vendor is a feature request in a queue behind every other customer's, with no committed date and no obligation. When the thing you need changed is the thing that makes your shop win quotes, the queue is not an acceptable answer.

What we can actually prove, including what we cannot

The list above is worth exactly as much as the evidence behind the firm making it, so here is ours, with nothing rounded up and one uncomfortable disclosure first. Our nameable reference is a law firm, not a machine shop. Jim Glaser Law is that reference and the principal takes reference calls; five channel specific voice agents route and handle intake there, and the call volume across our practice, measured in our own call-platform totals as of August 2026, is more than 6,000 AI handled calls. The law firm platform is the fullest example of what commissioning looks like at operational scale: a law firm runs its matter, invoice and IOLTA (the client trust account a law firm must keep separate) trust operation on it, holding 13,296 matters, 4,396 clients and 5,684 invoices, with trust reconciled byte identical against the system it replaced, from the client platform database, August 2026. That firm is under confidentiality and stays anonymised, which is why we name the platform and not the firm. Across the practice we have delivered more than forty commissions.

What that evidence supports is a specific claim: we can build and run a system that carries real operational volume and reconciles to the penny under audit. What it does not support is a claim that we have decommissioned a Global Shop Solutions install for anybody, because we have not, or that we have a machine shop you can call today. If a named manufacturing reference is what you need before you spend money, say so on the call and we will tell you plainly where we are rather than talking around it.

Seven situations where every argument in the previous section fails, and where we would tell you to stay put on a call. Not one of the public shortlists for this software has a section like this, which should tell you something about what those shortlists are for.

Shops with years of custom modules and no in-house developer. This is the biggest one and it is not close. If your estimators work in custom screens, your ownership reads custom reports, and the logic inside them was built up over a decade, the switching cost is not the licence, it is losing the accumulated decisions. Rebuilding that on any platform costs more than the pricing pain you are currently feeling, and doing it without a technical person inside the building is how ERP projects become case studies.

Shops inside an active multi year contract. Global Shop Solutions publishes no contract terms, so we cannot tell you what your exit looks like and neither can anyone else on the internet. Pull your own agreement and read the term, the auto renewal clause, the notice period and any early termination provision before you assume a switch is free. If there is a penalty, the honest answer may be to wait for the renewal window and use the numbers on this page as leverage inside it.

Shops under about ten users. The arithmetic does not work. At 8 seats and $100 a seat the three year subscription including implementation is about $49,700 in our model, and the cheapest build we would scope is $21,750 over the same three years. Below that threshold the right move is a cheaper published ERP, and Cetec publishes a number you can check in ten seconds.

Shops that need something working next quarter. A commissioned build ships a prototype in seven to ten days and production in five to seven weeks, and an ERP migration on top of that runs four to nine months. If the deadline is real and near, buying is faster than building and it is not close.

Shops whose rate is genuinely at the low end. If your order form says $100 a seat with no escalator, you have a good contract for this category. The one year table above shows Global Shop Solutions as the third cheapest recurring line in the whole comparison at that rate. Take that contract to renewal and defend it.

Shops where nobody will own the system internally. An owned build needs a named person who cares about it, even at a light touch. A shop without that person is better off renting, because the alternative is an orphaned system that decays quietly and then fails on the week you need it.

Shops whose constraint is on the floor, not in the software. If the thing costing you money is machine capacity, a hiring gap, a scrap rate or a supplier, changing ERPs is motion rather than progress. A meaningful share of the audit calls we run end with us recommending the business keep what it has, and this is the most common reason for it. If a switch is genuinely warranted, NetSuite manufacturing alternatives runs the same honesty test against a different incumbent.

1. Do you know your actual per seat rate, your total annual cost and your contract's renewal terms? If no, stop and go find the order form. Every decision after this one depends on it, and the reported ranges on this page are a substitute for that document rather than a replacement for it. If yes, continue.

2. Is your shop under about ten users? If yes, stop here. Price Cetec ERP against your current contract, and price JobBOSS2 if you want a second quote. No build we would scope returns its cost at your volume. If no, continue.

3. Is your rate at or below $100 a seat with no escalator? If yes, stop. You have one of the better contracts in this category and the table above proves it. Use the three year figure as leverage at renewal and spend your energy on the floor instead. If no, continue.

4. Is the thing that actually costs you money an ERP problem? If yes, meaning job costing, scheduling, inventory accuracy, traceability or the general ledger, then a different ERP may genuinely help and Cetec or Fulcrum is where to look. Stop here and go get quotes. If no, continue.

5. Can you name the workflow in one sentence, with a rough dollar or hour figure attached? Quoting turnaround, estimator hours per quote, late promise dates, engineering time spent reading customer PDFs. If you cannot write that sentence with a number in it, stop and spend two weeks measuring before anyone spends money. Every failed build we have seen started with an unnamed constraint. If yes, continue.

6. Run your numbers in the calculator above. Does a build at the price you would actually pay cross below your subscription inside your planning horizon? If no, stop, and say so out loud to whoever is selling you one, us included. If yes, and the budget runway is real this quarter, and an owner or general manager will sit the 20-minute audit call, that call is the next step. Often enough that we say it before you book, that call ends with us telling you to stay where you are. Start that call from the $499 AI-Ready Audit page, which explains what the call covers.

None of the public guides to this software answers this question with specifics, which is strange, because it is the question that decides whether a shop ever acts on any of the rest. Here is the honest shape of it. The timelines below are our own scoping ranges for an engagement of this type, stated as estimates rather than dressed up as research, and no vendor publishes a comparable figure.

You are not moving an ERP. You are moving nine things. Item and customer masters, which are the easy part and the part every vendor's migration page talks about. Bills of material, including revisions and phantom levels. Routers and work centre definitions, including setup and run standards that took years to tune. Open work orders in flight. Job costing history, which is what your estimator uses to price the next repeat. Lot and serial traceability records. Inventory quantities and valuation, which have to reconcile to the penny at cutover. The general ledger with accounts receivable and payable history. And quoting history, which is the most commonly forgotten and the most commonly missed once it is gone.

Traceability is the part that is genuinely hard. If you hold AS9100, ITAR obligations or automotive PPAP requirements, a gap in the lot and serial record is not an inconvenience, it is a customer conversation you cannot have. Decide early whether the old system stays available read only for the retention period rather than assuming the history transfers cleanly, and put that decision in the plan before anyone signs anything.

Phase one: export and inventory. Before anything moves, someone answers what is actually in there and what of it matters. Our planning range is four to eight weeks at this shop size for a full extraction and reconciliation. The deliverable that matters at the end of this phase is a reconciliation count: parts out equals parts in, jobs out equals jobs in, inventory value out equals inventory value in, with the exceptions listed rather than rounded away.

Phase two: parallel run. Both systems live. New jobs go into the new system, the old one goes read only, and nothing is switched off. Run this through at least one full month end close and one complete job cycle from quote through shipment to invoice, because the gaps in an ERP migration do not surface when you look for them, they surface when a customer asks for the cert package on a job you ran in 2022. A shop that skips the parallel run to save six weeks usually spends the saving twice.

Phase three: cutover and decommission. Only after the parallel run has produced no unresolved exceptions, and only after someone has read the notice provisions in the order form. An ERP contract that auto renews will renew during a migration if nobody sends the letter, and that is a five figure mistake made entirely on a calendar.

A realistic total is four to nine months from decision to switching off the old system. The largest driver of that number is not shop size, it is how much history you are obliged to carry forward and how much custom work sits in the current system. That is something you can scope this week by asking your estimator how often they open a job from more than two years ago.

What we do and do not do here. We have not run a Global Shop Solutions decommissioning and we are not going to imply otherwise. What we build is the workflow layer that sits alongside whichever ERP you land on, which is a different job. If your project needs an ERP migration partner, that is a specialist engagement and the vendor you are moving to will usually name two or three.

The option most shops do not consider. You do not have to leave to fix the problem. In a large share of the cases we see, the ERP is fine, the licence is defensible, and the money is leaking in a workflow that sits beside it: quoting turnaround, spec extraction from customer drawings, promise date accuracy, supplier price reconciliation. That path keeps the ERP, keeps the custom modules, keeps ten years of job history, and builds the missing piece against the data you already own. No migration, no parallel run, no cutover weekend.

If you are weighing a different incumbent in the same vertical, NetSuite manufacturing alternatives runs the same arithmetic against the enterprise suite, Epicor AI alternatives covers the closest like for like on this list, and Paperless Parts alternatives takes the quoting layer specifically. For the marketplace question that comes up alongside ERP, Steelhead versus Xometry separates a job shop system from a marketplace. If you are still choosing an advisor rather than a system, the best AI consultants for specialty manufacturers ranks the field on who publishes a price and who can put a client on the phone, and the specialty manufacturing overview is the wider view of where these systems fit. For the build side in detail, the Epicor Kinetic AI playbook documents what integrating at the ERP data layer actually involves. And the manufacturer brief is the short version of how a commission works for a shop this size.

Next step

Start with the $499 audit. Bring the ERP platform, the quoting spreadsheet or process, and the production step where schedule accuracy breaks down. The call identifies whether a custom build, an off-the-shelf product, or an ERP configuration change fits the constraint. The call is part of the audit; no obligation after it.

Related reading: NetSuite Alternatives for Manufacturers: 8 Options Priced.

Related reading: Custom AI builds: what we commission and what it costs.