From Excel and Email to GoSmarter in 30 Days

If you are reading this guide, your operation probably runs on a combination of Excel files, email threads, and institutional knowledge stored in one person’s head. You know it is not sustainable. You have been meaning to fix it for years. And you are sceptical. Every time someone sells you “the system that will fix everything,” you end up with more admin, not less.

This guide is not a sales pitch. It is a practical walkthrough of what the first 30 days on GoSmarter actually looks like. Written for metals operations that have never implemented software before and do not have an IT team to call on.

No consultant. No six-month project. No training course. Just a working system by the end of the month.

Who This Guide Is For

This guide is for metals manufacturers who:

• Track inventory, orders, and cut plans in spreadsheets
• Manage mill certificates by printing them and filing them in folders, or emailing them to customers manually when they ask
• Have tried ERP and found it either too expensive, too complex, or both
• Are running a team of fewer than 100 people without a dedicated IT function
• Are tired of the same three problems: wrong data, missing certs, and time wasted rebuilding plans that should update themselves

Service centre, rebar manufacturer, stockholder, fabricator: still fighting spreadsheets every morning? You are exactly who this is for.

What You Will Be Running by Day 30

By the end of the month, your team will have:

• Mill certificates processed automatically: PDFs uploaded, data extracted, files renamed and searchable without anyone typing a thing
• A live cut list generator: optimal cutting plans produced in minutes instead of hours
• Live inventory linked to cert data: every item in stock traced back to its certificate from the moment it arrives
• An ERP export or API feed (if you want one): GoSmarter data flows into your existing system rather than creating a parallel data entry job

You do not need to do all of this in week one. Most customers start with one product. Start with whichever pain point is costing the most time, then add the rest when ready.

Week 1: Get the Quick Win

The fastest way to see value is to start with the problem that is costing you the most time today.

If your biggest pain is mill certificates

Upload your first batch of PDFs to MillCert Reader.

Day 1–2:

1. Sign up. Your 14-day trial starts immediately. No credit card required. Nothing to install; it runs in your browser.
2. Drag and drop a folder of certificates. Scanned paper, digital PDFs from the mill, anything you have. The AI reads them within seconds and extracts heat numbers, grades, dimensions, and test results.
3. Check the output. Compare a few extractions against the originals. Adjust the confidence threshold if needed. Most teams are satisfied within the first batch.

Day 3–5: 4. Upload your historical archive, or as much of it as you can find. GoSmarter builds a searchable index automatically. You can now find any cert by heat number, grade, mill, or date in seconds. 5. If you use Metals Manager, certificates link to stock items automatically as new deliveries arrive. Goods-in becomes a drag-and-drop, not a filing session.

By end of week one, your quality team stops hunting through folders. Your production manager stops chasing suppliers for certs that were definitely sent six months ago.

If your biggest pain is cut list planning

Import your inventory into Cutting Plans (formerly Cutting Optimiser).

Day 1–2:

1. Sign up. Free trial, no time limit, no credit card. Browser-based.
2. Export your current stock from your spreadsheet as a CSV and upload it. Most teams have their first inventory loaded within an hour. If your column headings are non-standard, the onboarding guide covers common variations.
3. Add your open orders: import from CSV or type them in if you have a short job list.

Day 3–5: 4. Run your first cut plan. GoSmarter’s algorithm weighs every open order, every stock length, every grade and constraint. It produces an optimal cutting list in minutes. 5. Compare it against what you would have planned manually. The scrap savings are usually obvious immediately. In Midland Steel’s first trial run (193 jobs, 734 tonnes of rebar), the system hit a 2.5% scrap rate. Their previous average was over 5%. 6. Export to PDF for the floor, or export to CSV to feed into your ERP.

By end of week one, morning planning takes minutes instead of hours.

Weeks 2–3: Stabilise and Expand

The second week is about running GoSmarter in parallel with your existing process, not replacing it yet. That matters: it lets your team build confidence in the system’s output before they stop relying on the spreadsheet.

By the end of week two, most customers have stopped updating their planning spreadsheet. The system is faster and more accurate, and double-entering data gets old quickly.

Week three is where you add the second product if you started with just one. If you started with MillCert Reader, add Cutting Plans. If you started with Cutting Plans, add MillCert Reader and link cert data to your inventory.

By week three, your goods-in process changes. Material arrives, you upload the certificate, and stock and cert data link from day one. No separate filing. No separate data entry. No “where’s the cert for heat number 4729?” conversations ever again.

Common Concerns, Addressed Honestly

“Our data is a mess. We can’t migrate it.”

You do not need to migrate everything before you start. GoSmarter works from your current stock position and your open orders. Start with what you have today. Enter current stock, import active jobs, and build from there. You do not need five years of history to get value from the system in week one.

For historical certificates, upload what you have when you have time. GoSmarter does not care how old the PDFs are.

“We’ve tried software before and it ended up being more work.”

That is usually because the software was designed for a generic business, not for metals manufacturing. Every import format, every field name, every workflow in GoSmarter is built around the way metals operations actually work. Not the way a software consultant thinks they should work.

There is no “configuration project.” There is no data mapping exercise. You upload a spreadsheet, tell GoSmarter which columns are which, and the system does the rest.

“Our team won’t adopt it.”

Adoption happens when the software makes people’s jobs easier, not harder. If your production manager spends two hours every morning building a cut plan, GoSmarter does it in five minutes. Nobody needs persuading after that.

The one thing that does kill adoption is forcing people to enter the same data in two places. That is why the first thing to do is stop maintaining the spreadsheet once GoSmarter is giving you confident output. Running both in parallel for two weeks is fine. Running both indefinitely is not.

“We have a quality manager who will want evidence before trusting the cert data.”

This is a reasonable concern. The first time someone on your team trusts an AI extraction over their own eyes, they will push back. That is fine. The way through it is transparency: GoSmarter shows confidence scores on every field it extracts. GoSmarter flags low-confidence fields for review. Your quality manager can spot-check the output against the original PDF at any time. After a few hundred certificates, the pattern is obvious. The AI is right. The manual process was the one introducing errors.

What to Keep vs What to Retire

A common anxiety is that GoSmarter will replace something important. It will not. Here is what stays and what goes:

Keep

• Your ERP: GoSmarter is not trying to replace your ERP. Finance, purchasing, and sales order management are not what GoSmarter does. Your ERP continues to do what it does; GoSmarter adds the production and cert management capabilities your ERP does poorly.
• Your customer relationships: nothing changes about how you interact with customers. Certificate delivery to customers is faster (and more reliable), but the relationship is yours.
• Your production expertise: GoSmarter generates optimised cut plans, but your production manager still reviews and overrides them. The system is a tool, not a replacement for judgement.

Retire

• The cert folder (physical or digital): GoSmarter is your archive. Everything is searchable. No more hunting through folders or emailing suppliers for replacements.
• The master planning spreadsheet: once GoSmarter is your live system, maintaining a parallel spreadsheet is wasted effort. Most customers stop updating it naturally around week two.
• The manual cut list: if you are hand-calculating cuts or building lists in Excel, this goes. Not gradually. Abruptly, once you have run your first GoSmarter plan and seen the scrap difference.
• The paper cert log: the register you keep to track which certs have arrived and which are still outstanding. GoSmarter tracks this automatically.

ERP Integration: Infor, SAP, and Everything Else

GoSmarter sits alongside your ERP. It does not compete with it. The integration options are:

CSV export (works with everything)

Every export from GoSmarter (cut plans, stock reports, cert data) can be downloaded as a CSV. Every ERP can import CSV. Push GoSmarter data straight in without any technical work. This is how most customers start.

REST API (for closer integration)

GoSmarter offers a REST API for customers who want to automate the data flow. Common use cases:

• Infor CloudSuite Industrial / SyteLine: push cut plan outputs into production orders automatically; pull open sales orders from Infor into GoSmarter for planning
• SAP Business One or SAP S/4HANA: sync stock receipts between GoSmarter and SAP; export certificate data to SAP Quality Management
• Other ERPs (SYSPRO, Epicor, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics): the API is standard REST/JSON; any ERP with an API or middleware layer (such as Zapier or Make) can connect

You do not need the API to get started. The CSV workflow covers 80% of integration needs. If you want automated two-way sync, the API is there when you are ready.

What you do not need to do

You do not need to replace your ERP. You do not need to run a parallel implementation project. You do not need to involve your ERP vendor. GoSmarter adds capability on top of what you already have.

Your 30-Day Success Checklist

Use this as your running reference. Tick items off as you go.

Week 1: First win

• Sign up for your free trial (MillCert Reader: 14-day; Cutting Plans: no time limit)
• Upload your first batch of mill certificates or import your first inventory CSV
• Run your first AI cert extraction or cut plan
• Validate the output against your existing process
• Share access with one other team member

Week 2: Run in parallel

• Process all incoming deliveries through GoSmarter instead of your previous manual method
• Run every cut plan through GoSmarter alongside your existing process
• Review discrepancies. Where do they come from?
• Stop updating the planning spreadsheet (or decide explicitly to keep it another week)

Week 3: Expand

• Add the second GoSmarter product if you started with one
• Link cert data to inventory (if using Metals Manager)
• Set up your first CSV export to your ERP
• Train the rest of your team. It should take less than an hour.

Week 4: Consolidate

• Retire the cert folder (physical and digital)
• Retire the manual cut list process
• Confirm your ERP data feed is working reliably
• Book a check-in with GoSmarter support if anything is not working as expected
• Run a before-and-after comparison: time spent on planning, scrap rate, cert retrieval time

At day 30, you should be able to answer yes to three questions:

1. Is GoSmarter your primary source of truth for production data?
2. Has your morning planning time decreased?
3. Has anyone asked you for a cert that you could not find within 30 seconds?

If the answers are yes, yes, and no: you are live.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Resources

• GoSmarter for Metals Operations — the full toolkit overview
• Spreadsheet-to-System Planning for Metals Manufacturers — why spreadsheet-based planning breaks down and what replaces it
• Mill Certificate Automation — automating the cert side of your goods-in process
• MillCert Reader product page — features, pricing, and free trial
• Cutting Plans product page — AI-optimised cut lists for long products
• Midland Steel Manufacturing Case Study — a real implementation story, from spreadsheets to live connected systems
• No-Code Workflows for Metals SMEs — how GoSmarter works without IT involvement
• Integrated Cert Traceability — linking certificate data to stock, orders, and despatch

GoSmarter is made by Nightingale HQ, a UK-based AI company building practical tools for metals manufacturers since 2018.