The Challenge
Darkon Architectural Lighting designs and manufactures custom architectural lighting products. Their production environment spans both office based engineering design and a physical shop floor, two worlds that needed to share information in real time.
They needed a system that could monitor production costs, issue shop floor work instructions, manage Bills of Materials for both catalogue and custom products, handle composite assemblies from multiple sources, and track the full sales lifecycle from quote to delivery.
What Evocate Delivered
Evocate built a custom SharePoint 2010 application that works across both the office and the shop floor, integrated with industrial-grade rugged touchscreens so production staff interact with the same system as the engineering team:
- Bill of Materials management: engineers create reusable BOMs linked to 3D product representations, handling both catalogue products and one-off custom assemblies
- Shop floor scheduling: predefined labour steps pushed to operators who clock in and out of each step directly on the touchscreens
- Production cost monitoring: material and labour allocation tracked in real time as work progresses
- Sales lifecycle management: custom and routine products quoted and tracked on one platform from initial quote through to delivery
Outcomes
Darkon gained real-time visibility over production cost and progress, closing the gap between the engineering desk and the shop floor that had previously separated design from manufacturing. Custom and catalogue products are now quoted from the same platform, improving quoting efficiency and consistency. Delivered over eight months, the system worked well enough that the relationship continued into a follow-on Sales & Order Processing integration, extending the same platform deeper into the business.
Why This Matters
Manufacturers often run two disconnected worlds: engineering and office systems on one side, the shop floor on the other, bridged by paper and manual re-entry. Evocate’s approach shows that a governed platform built on tools a business already owns can span both, with rugged touchscreens bringing office-grade workflow to the production line. Tracking cost, labour, and the full quote-to-delivery lifecycle in one place is what turns a factory’s scattered processes into a single controllable system, and it is a pattern that applies to any make-to-order manufacturer.
