Manufacturing and Plant Floor App Development

Who can build an enterprise mobile app for a manufacturing plant

Tepia builds plant floor apps for manufacturers that still run production on paper travelers, clipboards and a shared spreadsheet next to the ERP. The buyer is usually an operations director or plant IT lead who has tried an off the shelf MES module, found it either too heavy or too rigid, and wants a tool shaped around how the floor actually works.

Manufacturing is one of Tepia’s listed industry verticals, and the work draws on Tepia’s enterprise app experience: MDM managed devices, SSO, offline first sync, audit trails and the Training and Launch phases that determine whether a plant adopts a tool or ignores it. Tepia’s project management, design leadership and engineering leadership are US based, which matters when a rollout involves standing on the floor at 5 a.m. with the first shift.

Tepia also builds the admin and supervisor web portals that pair with floor apps, so the production manager sees what the operator scans, and the quality manager sees what the inspector records, in real time.

Plant floor use cases Tepia builds

Tepia scopes manufacturing apps by use case. Most clients start with one or two and add more once the floor trusts the tool. The table shows what each use case includes and what it connects to.

Tepia builds the floor app natively in Kotlin for rugged Android devices, or in React Native when iPads are in use, with a React supervisor portal and a Node.js or .NET backend on AWS or Azure. For warehouse heavy operations, see Tepia’s warehouse and inventory app development page.

Rugged devices, offline sync and the realities of the floor

Plant floors break consumer app assumptions. Wi-Fi drops behind machines, operators wear gloves, screens get dusty, and a device that dies mid shift takes the paperwork with it. Tepia designs for these conditions from the first wireframe.

• Rugged Android first. Tepia builds for the handhelds and tablets used on floors and tests on the actual models you deploy, including scanner integration for built in barcode readers.
• Offline first sync. Every action is stored locally and synced when connectivity returns, with conflict rules defined in Discovery so two operators updating one job do not overwrite each other.
• Glove friendly design. Large targets, high contrast, minimal typing, scan and tap workflows, and kiosk mode that locks the device to the app.
• MDM and SSO. Tepia works with your mobile device management and identity provider so devices are provisioned, locked and wiped centrally, and operators log in by badge scan or PIN.
• Audit trail. Every sign off, measurement and change is recorded with user, time and device, which is what quality auditors and customers ask to see.

Tepia’s enterprise mobile app development page covers the security review and rollout practices that apply here.

ERP, MES and machine integration

A plant floor app is only useful if it agrees with the ERP. Tepia treats integration as a core deliverable and scopes it during Discovery with your ERP administrator in the room. Tepia connects through REST APIs where the ERP provides them, through scheduled file exchanges where it does not, and through middleware Tepia builds and hosts in your cloud account with a log of every transaction.

For machine data, Tepia reads from OPC UA servers, MQTT brokers and PLC gateways, stores time series data for availability and performance calculations, and pushes alerts to supervisors’ devices when a line stops. Tepia does not replace your MES if you have one that works; Tepia builds the operator facing layer that the MES lacks and feeds it clean data.

Where AI helps, Tepia adds it carefully: summarizing shift notes, flagging inspection patterns that predict nonconformance, or answering operator questions from work instruction documents using retrieval augmented generation over your own content. Tepia’s systems integration services page describes the approach in more depth.

How Tepia approaches manufacturing app development

Tepia runs plant floor projects through its six phase process with a US based project manager and time spent on the floor in every phase.

1. Discovery (typically 1 to 3 months). System investigation of the ERP, MES, QMS and device fleet, user interviews with operators, supervisors, quality and maintenance staff during real shifts, and a third party integration review. Deliverables: Investigation Summary, Interview Summary and User Stories by role.
2. Design. Design questionnaire, moodboards and a style guide for floor conditions, then detailed wireframes tested on the actual device and sample designs reviewed with operators.
3. Development and Testing (typically 3 to 6 months). Alpha and Beta schedules, test plans covering offline sync and ERP reconciliation, functional testing, user acceptance testing on one line or cell, and non functional testing for device battery life and sync load.
4. Training. In person sessions by shift with hands on practice on real jobs, plus remote sessions for supervisors and admins, using user story scenarios such as logging a nonconformance during a run.
5. Launch (about 1 month). Data migration of open jobs and asset records, transition from paper with a parallel run period, and Tepia support reps on site during the first shifts.

Details at tepia.co/process, with examples at tepia.co/our-work.

Frequently asked questions