From manual work to a business-critical order portal

The situation

Fast service that leans on manual work

At Zetprofiel there is a clear promise: an order that comes in in the morning often still lies on the construction site that same afternoon. Every order is then still drawn, calculated, and priced by hand by a craftsperson.

Zetprofiel wants to keep delivering quickly and allow customers to order online directly. The software therefore needs to perform calculations that craftspeople currently do by hand, such as the flat pattern dimensions and pricing. For many customers, this will be their first time ordering bent sheet metal online.

The question behind the question

Further than an order widget

From day one it was about more than handling orders. The portal had to digitize the whole craft: the drawing, the unfold, the weight, the price, and the work order. It had to connect to how Zetprofiel already works with customers and functions efficiently internally. That choice was fixed; it was our job to keep that line sharp throughout the whole trajectory.

A ready-made order widget could be installed quickly, but offered too little support for the company's own design, reference photos, customer-specific pricing, and work orders. The custom portal needed to fit that existing way of working.

That is why we kept the direction crystal clear. First put the core in place solidly, connecting to the existing process, in phases. We deliberately left the link to the bending machines out of version one: first you digitize what already runs, then comes the step toward the machine.

Approach

Craft knowledge translated into deterministic software

The portal runs in the browser around a central drawing module. In it you build a profile directly on the canvas or adjust a standard shape. Underneath runs a pure geometry core that works entirely without a screen and is extensively tested; that decoupling makes ongoing maintenance reliable. From that core we calculate the developed length with the bend deduction as laid down in DIN 6935. The bending physics thereby lives in tested functions and no longer in a spreadsheet or in someone's head.

Weight and price flow from the same data. The price build-up stays deliberately deterministic: material, operations, coating, linked to the customer-specific tier. It is all frozen at the moment of ordering. An old order can later be reconstructed exactly and a price change can never adjust existing work retroactively. Around every order the system generates a work-order PDF, including a QR code for the shop floor, plus an optimized cutting list to keep material waste small. We link invoicing robustly to the accounting package (SnelStart), a link that withstands repetition and error recovery.

We deliberately choose a few technical starting points, so ongoing development stays manageable in the long run:

• Typed, strict contracts. One validated API contract is the source of truth, from which the frontend client is generated fully automatically. This helps us catch differences between backend and frontend, such as a field with the wrong type, during the build.
• Framework at the edges. The business logic, the price, the order flow, the underlying physics, sits completely apart from the web framework. The framework lives only in thin adapters at the edge, so you can test the logic independently and take it to another domain. A later technical choice does not touch the core that way.
• Loose coupling, tight boundaries. Components talk to each other exclusively via clear contracts. That makes the system agile: you add new functionality without a change rippling through the whole codebase.

The concrete result for Zetprofiel is a foundation that can continue flexibly and robustly, with as little vendor lock-inGlossary · In briefvendor lock-inVendor lock-in is dependence on one supplier that makes switching to an alternative difficult, expensive or disruptive.Read more as possible. The software grows with the company that way.

Quality and continuity

Built to keep running

Software that day-to-day production depends on is not judged only on how it performs now, but especially on the certainty that it keeps doing so. The calculation and pricing logic sits fully under a test coverageGlossary · In brieftest coverageTest coverage measures which parts of the code execute during automated tests. It can count lines, functions and branches, among other things.Read more that guards that a change in one formula does not secretly introduce an error in another. Every code change runs through a tightly set CI/CD pipelineGlossary · In briefCI/CDCI/CD is a way of working in which teams frequently merge software changes, check them automatically and use a defined sequence of steps to prepare or deploy them to production.Read more with least privilege to a separate acceptance and production environment. No change goes live without first being checked and tried. The full infrastructure runs on AWS and is recorded as Infrastructure as CodeGlossary · In briefinfrastructure as codeInfrastructure as code (IaC) is a practice in which infrastructure is described in configuration files and created and managed using software.Read more, in the customer's name. That last point is crucial for transferability and clear ownership.

A foundation to build on further

The portal runs in production. Zetprofiel's team now uses it daily to draw, calculate, and process orders.

So change management, not only technology. More important still is what stands now: a foundation to build on further. Customers who order online directly, tighter planning for large orders, and in time a link that further automates the workshop toward the machines. That way Zetprofiel can keep doing step by step what it is good at, while the software takes over more and more work.