Custom software for the mid-market shop: what to build, what to buy, what to skip

Mid-market manufacturing shops under two hundred million in revenue should buy ERP, MES, and quality-management software off the shelf wherever the off-the-shelf product matches the operation. They should build custom software in three specific places: at the points where the off-the-shelf product does not match the operation, at the points where multiple off-the-shelf products need to be connected, and at the points where a small operational improvement compounds across thousands of transactions per year. They should skip almost everything currently marketed as AI for manufacturing, with two exceptions: vision-based quality inspection where the application is narrow and the data is yours, and machine-translation for international supplier communication where the value is unambiguous.