Have you ever started a software project with a totally different purpose to what it became? No? Good job!
Our journey began at least ten years ago in 2015 as we studied mechanical engineering. That time a lot of mechanical companies started with web shops for metal sheet water jet and laser cutting. The idea was simple. Importing a 2D drawing, getting the length of the contour and calculate a price. As engineers, we wanted to do something really innovative. So we spent our master thesis for a web configurator for turned parts with live price calculation as well as a program parser for CNC turning.
We were not very experienced in coding. One semester of coding for engineers was just IT basic. Classes, public and private functions and variable declaration, PI iteration and so forth. No application for the „real world“. At that time, AngularJS was standard and Google started Angular2, which was not that stable at that time. (Keep that in mind while reading, you will need that information).
We started with our own web shop and its configurator for turned parts and searched for suppliers who can manufacture the configured parts. To be honest, it was some kind of difficult as many companies rejected and we had to do our own workshop. Great stuff! Do our own coding and start a new (old) carreer as lathe operator again! The decission made us very slow in development but it was the only way to proceed.
We figured out that it is too complex to work in too many fields and the shop itself did not scale. But our customers, partners and booth visitors mentioned several times that this easy to use software is a good approach for an ERP system, so we decided to rewrite our shop and backend. During the following years, a small offering and invoicing tool became a larger ERP system (we never wanted to write).