Manufacturing
Castor Manufacturing — ERP modernization + IoT OEE dashboard
Overview:
Castor Manufacturing ran an aging on-prem ERP that couldn't show production status without a Monday-morning Excel export. Leadership needed real-time visibility into Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) across 6 plants, plus a modern ERP for finance and inventory.
Approach:
Helios deployed Zoho One for ERP, inventory, and finance, then built a custom IoT layer on AWS pulling telemetry from PLCs via MQTT. A Next.js dashboard surfaces OEE metrics (availability, performance, quality) live across all plants. Alerts route to plant managers via Slack when OEE drops below threshold.
Engagement details:
Duration: 18 weeks build + 6-week pilot
Stack: Zoho One ERP, AWS IoT Core, MQTT, Next.js, TimescaleDB
Team size: 6 (1 architect, 2 Zoho, 1 IoT eng, 1 full-stack, 1 PM)
Plants: 6 across 3 US states
Outcome:
Unplanned downtime dropped 27% in the first quarter live. Leadership now sees OEE from any device. Castor expanded the platform to predictive maintenance with Helios 6 months later.
6
Plants connected to live OEE
-27%
Unplanned downtime
Real-time
OEE visibility from any device
