With its roots in the fenestration industry, in 2013, Total Control Pro Limited sighted the challenge of transforming the manufacturing industry, as it started its journey from being one of forecast driven to demand driven. Traditional processes were creating mounting paperwork and excel spreadsheets across factories. “Surely there had to be a better way”. Boosting productivity meant confronting the vast piles of paper printing, distribution, reading and management. The industry needed an efficient way to track and respond quickly to changes and challenges within production. At best, manufacturers could report on the data of the past but making future predictions and constructing methods of error avoidance was a thing of dreams.

Digital Technology being exploited during this time was largely inaccessible to the SME manufacturers due to complex and high implementation costs and in the main, provided for top-level rather than shop- floor information. This is when inspiration hit – what if we could provide an affordable solution to manufacturers across UK that connected their Production, Retail and Operations (PRO) departments that enabled them to track their production lines more efficiently at every stage, from order placement to deployment?

The company founders identified the way to transform the way in which enterprise software was being sold and deployed into industry – away from the slow and drawn out process requiring expensive and complex customization of server based systems, and towards the agility and speed of configurable cloud applications. Total Control Pro Limited had the potential from the outset to support multiple manufacturing industries and configurations.

“Our commitment shifted, we were to serve the masses, rather than the few,” Dorian Smellie, CEO, “having seen the impact on just a few, it was evident if we could provide this to the masses, we had the potential to transform the efficiency and output of an entire industry.”

Inside such a commitment, we turned to consider how to reach a mass market and break down the barriers of traditional system deployment. Deploying via the Internet meant technical and distribution barriers were broken down and furthermore, by offering a SAAS (software as a service) financial, Total Control Pro Limited also removed traditional financial barriers and could demonstrate to customers a fast return on their investment.

In 2015, although aiming to serve the UK industry, after the soft launch of our alpha website we had overseas SMEs and international OEMs in the transport, automotive, electronics, apparel and the construction industries approaching us. The penny dropped. We had something. However, TotalControlPro entered the scene as disruptors and realised the need to educate the marketplace.
Although unimaginable today, back in 2013, serious uncertainties and mistrusts surrounded the cloud amongst manufacturers, who had an engrained loyalty in legacy software sitting in black boxes in dirty onsite server racks. It was important for the company to stay true to its vision and hold its nerve.

Then in July 2016 Oracle announced its purchase of Netsuite and CEO, Safra A. Catz stated, “For us to grow we need to go online.” Adoption of the cloud amongst manufacturers was born. This same year TotalControlPro showcased at the Industry 4.0 Summit. We were there, ready – available, accessible and affordable. Being ahead of market trends allowed us to develop trustworthy software which had already been tried and tested with clients for the past three years. Attracting the interest of key partners, such as Malcolm Harold from the Knowledge Transfer Network and Innovate UK, we built trust and educated the industry.

Offering a technology that does not age and is improving daily has allowed us to compete with larger organisations. We wholeheartedly believe in building trust with our clients, empowering their workforces and enabling them to deliver the best customer service in return to their clients. Even today we are seeing original clients, who left in search for more functionalities, return to us and adopt a dramatically broadened feature list and a complemented tailored service to meet their exact needs while staying true to the accessible, available and affordable ethos.

The market is now ready for us and we are just getting started.