Manufacturing Intelligence in NetSuite: Consule Solutions Partners with Factbird

Two Answers to the Same Production Run

Consule Solutions and Factbird are bringing live machine data onto the NetSuite work order, so the shop floor and the back office are working from the same numbers.

Ask two people in a manufacturing business how last week’s production run went, and you will often get two different answers. The plant knows the line stopped four times. The back office knows the job closed at standard cost. Neither picture is wrong; they are just built from different data, collected at different times, by different people.

That gap is the reason we have partnered with Factbird.

Why we went looking for this

Consule Solutions has spent years implementing, integrating, and optimizing NetSuite for manufacturers, and the same conversation comes up on nearly every project. NetSuite is doing its job: it produces the work order, the bill of materials, the inventory, the financials. What clients keep asking for is a way to report what the machine actually did between the moment a job was released and the moment it was closed.

Historically, those metrics were filled in by hand. Operators write counts on a clipboard. Downtime gets recorded as a guess at the end of a shift, if it gets recorded at all. Someone keys it into a spreadsheet, then keys it into NetSuite. By the time the numbers arrive, they are days old, and nobody fully trusts them.

We sought out a manufacturing intelligence layer that could close that gap without adding another data entry step. Factbird does exactly that.

What Factbird brings

Factbird is a manufacturing intelligence suite that captures what actually happened on the line: units produced, run time, cycle speed, and every stop with a reason code behind it. Instead of factory data sitting hidden in machines or on paper, it becomes information your team can act on and trade for real productivity gains.

Critically, OEE is calculated automatically and wired directly into NetSuite.

What your team can finally see

• Live OEE. Availability, performance, and quality in one number, updating as the line runs.
• Real-time visibility. See changes in line status as they happen, not at the end of the shift.
• True job cost. Jobs costed on actual run time, not standards.
• Downtime Pareto. The stops that cost you most, ranked, so improvement effort goes where the money is.
• One source of truth. The floor and the back office finally agree.
• Automatic collection. No clipboards, no whiteboards, no double keying.

How it works

The flow is deliberately simple:

1. A work order is released in NetSuite.
2. The job runs, and Factbird measures it.
3. The results go back onto the work order.

Nothing gets typed in between. Every manual handoff you remove is a place where numbers stop drifting, and time back in your team’s shift.

A holistic approach to manufacturing operations

This partnership is not about replacing anything you already run. It is about each system doing the part it is genuinely good at:

• Factbird. Captures machine time, output, and downtime.
• Your MES. Handles labor, material, lot and serial numbers.
• NetSuite. Brings all of it together within the same work order.

One work order. One set of numbers.

When machine data, MES data, and financial data all land on one record, you stop reconciling and start deciding. Costing reflects reality. Capacity planning is based on the throughput you actually achieve rather than the throughput the spec sheet promised. And when a customer asks why a job ran long, the answer is on the work order instead of in someone’s memory.

Why Consule Solutions

Integrations like this are critical for operational excellence. Reason codes have to map to something meaningful in your item and work order structure. Costing has to behave correctly when actual run time replaces standards. Reporting has to give the plant, operations, and finance each a view they trust without three versions of the truth reappearing.

As an Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, our team handles the architecture, the data integration, and the configuration that turns a connected sensor into a number your controller will sign off on, and we stay on afterward through our C.A.R.E. program as your lines, products, and processes change.

Running NetSuite in a plant? Let’s talk

If you are running NetSuite in a plant today and still rely on manual data entry to know what your lines produce, this partnership was built for you. There is no need to rip anything out and no multi-year program to commit to.

Let’s look at what this would mean for your production lines.