The problem
An electronics manufacturer has to be able to answer, for any unit it ever shipped: what parts went into it, from which lots, what defects were found, how they were repaired, and which tests it passed. When I came onboard, SigmaTrack tracked one thing — work in progress. Everything else lived on paper, in spreadsheets, and in people's heads, which works right up until a customer audit or a component recall — and then it doesn't.
What I built
Module by module, over seven years, SigmaTrack grew from a WIP tracker into manufacturing execution:
- Product genealogy — system integration tying each built unit to what went into it.
- Defect and repair tracking — recorded at the station, resolved and traceable.
- Test tracking — which tests, which results, per unit.
- Materials — reading and writing Alliance MRP's database directly, so the floor and planning always agreed on inventory.
- Kitting — pulling and staging the right parts for a job.
- SMT feeder verification — scan-verify the right reel in the right feeder before the line runs.
- Component lot-code traceability — from receiving to shipped unit.
Decisions that mattered
Building it as a web application meant every station on the floor was a browser, not an installed client — new stations, new screens, and fixes deployed to everyone at once. That's an obvious call today; in mid-2000s manufacturing, where MES meant an expensive vendor package and installed clients, it wasn't.
Feeder verification is the kind of feature that justifies a homegrown MES: a wrong reel caught at setup costs seconds. A wrong reel caught at test — or in the field — costs a batch.
Growing module by module, instead of pitching a big-bang system, is why it survived. Each module solved a problem someone on the floor actually had that year, which bought the trust — and the mandate — for the next one.
SigmaTrack kept all of its own data in its own MS SQL Server database — but it read from and wrote to Alliance MRP's database on almost every page. The two systems were tightly integrated. A decade later, integrating Dynamics 365 at the same company, I did the opposite — everything through supported data entities, no direct writes. Both were the right answer for their era; knowing which era you're in is the skill.
Outcome
SigmaTrack became how the Cornwall facility ran production — routing, quality, materials, and traceability in one system, with lot-code-level answers available on demand instead of assembled by hand from paper. The stack was its era's — ColdFusion — and it ran a factory for years.
SigmaTrack itself stays behind the firewall. But years later I built MES Track — a from-scratch personal project, independent of any employer's systems — covering the same territory: serialized WIP tracking, scan stations, routing, defect & repair, and first-off inspection in Angular and TypeScript, runnable in one command on zero-config SQLite. Twenty years of factory-floor domain knowledge, in code you can actually read.