In 2025, digital manufacturers are looking for three main qualities when it comes to their software stack:

• A streamlined buying experience for their customers
• Visibility into every aspect of their business, so they can make data-driven decisions
• A comprehensive end-to-end system that allows them to automate their business processes and minimize manual data entry

To achieve these goals, digital manufacturers must make a choice: build their own solution, or buy off-the-shelf software.

In this article we'll explore the pros and cons of each approach, as well as a third hybrid approach: Buy and Build.

Table of Contents

• Pros and cons of buying an ERP/MES
• Pros and cons of building an ERP/MES
• The Buy and Build Approach
• Introducing CarbonOS

Pros and cons of buying an ERP/MES

Pros

Hit the ground running

Buying an off-the-shelf solution allows you to start using the software immediately, without waiting for it to be developed.

Lower upfront costs

The upfront cost of an off-the-shelf solution is much lower than building your own system from scratch.

Cons

Off-the-shelf solutions cover at best 80% of your needs

Off-the-shelf solutions are generic by design – there isn't an off-the-shelf product that can meet 100% of your needs.

It is challenging to close the remaining 20% gap

Without access to the source code, there is a limit to the customizations you can build on top of these systems. Off-the-shelf software vendors are unlikely to prioritize your specific needs in their roadmap, since they are building a product that needs to work for their entire customer base. You can piece together multiple off-the-shelf solutions, but that creates a different set of problems.

Risk of vendor lock-in

Your ERP/MES is a mission critical part of your business. If you rent your software and the vendor decides to double your price at your next contract renewal, you have little recourse.

Lack of direct access to your data

Most modern solutions are hosted in the cloud in a shared database (multi-tenant), meaning you can't have direct access to your data. This makes it harder to connect best-in-class BI / data visualization tools, meaning you have to rely on the reporting functionality within the ERP/MES itself.

Pros and cons of building an ERP/MES

Pros

Software and automation are part of your competitive advantage

Some of the ways you can differentiate yourself from your competitors include:

• Your approach to customer service
• The proprietary technology and manufacturing techniques you develop
• The data you collect, and the decisions you make with that data

Custom software can play a critical part in all three of these. In fact, there are some high-profile examples of advanced manufacturing companies building their own ERP/MES solutions (Hadrian, Anduril, SpaceX, and Tesla, for example).

Tailored to your unique needs

You can change your software to match the way your business operates, rather than changing the way your business operates to match your software.

Cons

High upfront costs and longer timeline

Starting from scratch means you won't have the software you need in place to run your business for many months (12+ in most cases).

Software design risks

Choosing the right tech stack requires extensive software development experience. Choosing the right data model for your ERP / MES requires extensive domain expertise in manufacturing software systems, which is a different skill. Design mistakes made early on can be costly to undo later on.

The Buy and Build Approach

There are significant upsides and downsides to both the Buy approach and Build approach. However, there is a third approach: Buy and Build.

The key insight of this approach is that all digital manufacturing businesses require the same foundation: a core system of record for business data and processes (quotes, orders, invoices, etc) and manufacturing data and processes (bills of material, inventory, production tracking, etc).

An invoice is an invoice, regardless of what your business manufactures. Building these core concepts from the ground up does not represent an opportunity for a competitive advantage. However, the ability to seamlessly integrate these concepts into the other aspects of your software stack (your customer interface, your business intelligence and analytics platform, your proprietary manufacturing technology, your interfaces with your machine tools, etc) does represent an opportunity for a competitive advantage.

The Buy and Build approach involves buying an extensible manufacturing operating system and then building a custom end-to-end, fully integrated software solution on top of it.

Introducing CarbonOS

We created CarbonOS specifically for digital manufacturers looking to Buy and Build. CarbonOS is:

• A next-gen manufacturing operating system including ERP, MES, and more – designed and built by a team of manufacturing experts with decades of collective experience in the industry.
• API-first – designed from the ground up to be the extensible foundation of your custom end-to-end operating system.
• Source-available – with direct access to the source code, you can customize every aspect of the system to match the unique needs of your business. Plus, you own the software so you don't have to worry about vendor lock-in.
• Built on a cutting-edge tech stack – including tools like Remix, Supabase, shadcn, Tailwind CSS, Vercel and more.
• Enterprise-ready – with support for multi-company and multi-currency businesses.

Building on top of CarbonOS gives you the best of both worlds.

CarbonOS comes out of the box with all of the functionality you need to run your factory. This means you don't need to dedicate multiple engineers and over a year to reinventing the wheel when it comes to core ERP and MES functionality.

Plus, it provides an extensible foundation upon which you can build your end-to-end, fully integrated software stack.

• With access to the comprehensive API and the source code itself, you can customize CarbonOS in any way you need to work seamlessly with your other software tools.
• With the CarbonOS SDK you can seamlessly integrate CarbonOS into your branded customer interface and proprietary technology and automation.
• With direct access to the database, you can connect your favorite BI / analytics tool, or create your own custom dashboards and reports.
• With the advent of AI-enabled development tools, it's never been easier to build custom applications and workflows on top of an API-first system of record like CarbonOS.

If you're interested in learning more about CarbonOS, reach out and we'll schedule a call.