Otto

by Plain James Software

Hyper-vertical ERP for upholstered furniture manufacturers

Not an ERP for ‘manufacturing.’
An ERP for your plant.

Otto is hyper-vertical. Already customized for upholstered furniture, we go one step further and custom tailor to your business. Otto is built with success in mind. We understand two things make or break an ERP: careful migration and real training.

30 minutes on your real workflow, not a canned tour.

Otto Production Schedule Board showing line capacity, work orders and loads
Built for Upholstered furniture makers Plants that outgrew a generic ERP iSeries / AS400 migrations

Why Otto

Generic ERPs make you fit them. Otto is fitted to you.

A general-purpose ERP is a toolkit for every industry, an expert in none. Otto is narrow on purpose, and deep into your business. We deliver it with care, focusing on the two places other ERP projects often fail: the data and the people.

Hyper-vertical, all the way down

Vertical software knows your industry. Hyper-vertical software knows your company. Otto already speaks frames, foam, fabric, and cut-and-sew, we teach it your order routing, reports, shortcuts.

Your history comes with you

Decades of your items, customers and open orders move over cleanly, reconciled against your old system before anyone depends on the new one.

Training on your data, for your people

Role-by-role sessions for your floor and your front office, using your own orders and products. Your team is productive on day one, not day ninety.

The product

One system from your customers' orders to your loading dock.

Order entry as fast as you can type

On the desktop Otto is keyboard-first: tab, type, done. Your customer service department never has to reach for the mouse, just like on the green screens they already know.

  • Fabric, accent, and custom orders built for upholstered furniture
  • Pricing and availability right in the line
  • Fast enough for your phone-in customers
  • In a hurry? Smart processing can process your customers' PO doc directly
Otto order entry with keyboard shortcut hints

Easy on the shop floor

Phones, tablets, and scan guns access the same Otto system, made friendly for touch-screens. Your crew receives, moves, and ships from the floor, as easily as from a desk.

  • Scan with your in-device camera or a scan gun
  • Optimized per device: keyboard on desktop, touch on mobile
  • Every scan reflected on your inventory and reports as it happens
Otto Scan mobile menu

A production schedule you can actually run the plant from

Line capacity, crew, work orders and truck loads on one board, with a scheduling engine that flags conflicts and shortages before they reach the floor.

  • Man-hour capacity by line and day
  • Work orders tied to sales orders and truck loads
  • Conflicts, shortages and proposed moves surfaced for you

Behind it sit the reports your plant runs on: sales, shipping, inventory, production and billing, filtered and exported the way you want them.

Otto Production Schedule Board

Make it yours

As much customization as your business needs, and no more.

Every plant has the thing that makes it different. Otto gives you a ladder for it: start with simple settings and customize only as far as you need. No rung takes you away from a fully upgradable Otto stack.

Configure

Set it up your way

Custom fields on your items and customers, custom serial/order numbering formats, your labels and code tables. All settings, no code.

Express

Describe your logic

Pricing and surcharge rules scoped to your customers and products, plus import and export mappings that reshape data the way your partners need it.

Integrate

Connect your tools

Your own apps and dealer portals talk to Otto through a secure API. Stay in control of your bespoke business logic, while maintaining data consistency right inside Otto.

Silo

Run your own instance

When your needs go deeper, Otto runs as your own dedicated deployment, with extensions built just for you and kept apart from everyone else.

Migrating from iSeries?

Leave the green screen, but keep your experience

If you are running on an iSeries (AS/400), your system holds years of hard-won business rules. We read them, preserve what matters and retire what doesn't.

  1. DiscoverWe study your current system, files and the quirks your team works around.
  2. Map & migrateRepeated trial loads, reconciled line by line until the numbers tie out.
  3. TrainHands-on, role-based sessions using your own data.
  4. Go live, togetherWe stay close through cutover and the weeks after.
Talk to us about your migration

About

A small shop, on purpose.

Plain James Software is a small, agile shop, building software for businesses like yours. When you call, you reach the people who wrote the code. We can change Otto for your business in days, not quarters.

No account-manager hand-offs, no giant implementation partner, no “that's not on our roadmap.”

If you manufacture furniture, your feature is within our scope!

A craftsperson sewing at an industrial machine in a small workshop

Book a demo

See Otto on your kind of work.

Tell us a little about your plant. We'll reply within one business day to set up 30 minutes, tailored to how you actually build and ship.