Field notes.
Long-form engineering writing on how Polymr fits into manufacturing operations. Specific, opinionated, drawn from the shape of real deployments.
Everything we have written.
Newest first. Each piece is grounded in a real deployment lesson or a recurring question from an evaluation conversation.
- EngineeringMay 19, 202617 min
Reading five drawing formats into one BOM
A real engineering intake never arrives as one clean file. It arrives as a PDF, a STEP export, a native CAD file, a DWG someone exported in 2014, and an email with the actual spec in the third paragraph. Reconciling that into a single typed BOM is most of the work.
- EngineeringMay 18, 202617 min
BOM genealogy under revision (and why the chain snaps at the ERP boundary)
A bill of materials is not a list. It is a versioned tree where every node carries a history of substitutions, revisions, and rolled-up decisions. The chain reads fine on one side of the ERP boundary and reads as a flat list on the other.
- EngineeringMay 12, 202618 min
Human-in-the-loop as a product primitive, not a config flag
Approval cannot be a step in a workflow graph. It has to be a property of every action object the runtime can emit. Treating it any other way is one config flag away from a bad write to a production system.
- Field notesMay 10, 202616 min
Vendor scoring that survives a procurement review
Most vendor scorecards encode the senior buyer's gut into a spreadsheet, then call it objective. A scorecard that holds up to a procurement review has to disclose the weights, source the signals, and lose the soft fields.
- ComparisonsMay 5, 202618 min
The real cost of a 6-18 month ERP rollout
The licence is the small line item. The expensive parts are the calendar, the SME hours, and the operational disruption while the rollout is in flight. An operations-layer overlay changes the numerator and the denominator.
- ComparisonsApr 28, 202617 min
The three failure modes of MRP overlays
An overlay on top of an existing MRP fails in one of three recognisable ways: the planning loop diverges, the write surface drifts, or the operator builds a parallel system in a spreadsheet. Each failure has a structural cause and a specific fix.
- EngineeringApr 20, 202616 min
Provenance as a product feature, not a backend log
Source-linked cells are the difference between a system the operator trusts and a system they audit twice. Provenance has to be the same primitive as the cell itself, not a query you run after the fact.