See Andea GridUp in action
The floor tells the story better than we can. Watch it.
It’s the quickest way to see if it fits how you actually build.
The floor tells the story better than we can. Watch it.
It’s the quickest way to see if it fits how you actually build.
Electrical equipment manufacturing (NAICS 33531) is built to order far more often than it is pulled off a shelf. A power transformer, a switchgear lineup, a custom motor: each one carries its own drawing, its own bill of materials, and its own test plan. That mix throws up six problems you see in plant after plant.
That first problem is the one making the other five harder to ignore. Demand isn't a future trend to plan for, it's already moving through the same plants that spent the slow years without investing in the systems to absorb it.
Grid upgrades, electrification, and data-center buildouts have pushed order backlogs past what most plants were built to run, and years of underinvestment in shop-floor systems means there's no slack left to absorb it.
Paper travelers and spreadsheets fall apart when the routing changes with each order, and the current revision is hard to keep in front of operators.
A transformer can take months from core to final test, so status is easy to lose and hard to report.
The dielectric, insulation-resistance, and routine tests have to happen, and a missed test that reaches the field becomes a recall.
Utilities and inspectors want unit-level records years after delivery, long after the paper has gone to a box.
Coil winding, core stacking, and HV assembly depend on certified operators, and someone has to track who is signed off for which job.
The demand behind these problems is climbing. Grid upgrades, electrification, EVs, and new data-center load all pull on the same transformer and switchgear output, which puts more one-off builds through the same plants. See our overview of the electrical equipment sector and its 2026 trends maps where that demand is heading: Electrical Equipment Manufacturing Industry: Sector Overview & Key Trends 2026
A shared foundation sits under the three pillars: Data Loader pulls the order, BOM, and master data in, and DataBridge sends results back to your ERP and PLM. One version of the order, the BOM, and the routing runs across every module.
A working demo walks the screens your team would use, from the operator workstation through quality and test capture to the maintenance views. We can set it up on your own process.
New capacity used to take years to reach full production, and a surprising share of that delay had nothing to do with standing up a new building or installing the equipment. It was the manufacturing software: months of workshops just to decide what the system should do, followed by a build-out before a single unit could run through it.
Andea GridUp removes that phase. The routing, quality capture, build history, and ERP and PLM integration an electrical equipment plant needs are already modeled before you break ground. Your team configures the last 20%, your specific routings, your specific tests, instead of designing a system from a blank screen while the building goes up around it.
That matters most right now. Manufacturers aren't just fighting backlog in existing plants, they're racing to bring new ones online to keep up with demand, and the expectation from leadership is that a new facility reaches production in a fraction of the time it used to. A prebuilt MES is one of the few levers that actually shortens that timeline, because the software readiness question is answered before the first machine is installed.
What this looks like in practice:
Andea GridUp drives the floor from the released order, so the instructions in front of an operator always match the unit on the bench.
This is where generic systems fall short. Repetitive-line software assumes the next unit looks like the last one, and in an engineer-to-order plant it rarely does, and the routing has to follow the drawing for that specific unit.
Andea GridUp captures every result as the work happens and checks it against its limits automatically.
This is what separates in-process capture from after-the-fact reporting: results are recorded at the operation, as the work happens, and checked against their limits on the spot, not reconstructed later.
A transformer order can sit on the floor for months, so machine uptime and skilled labor decide whether it ships on time.
A utility calls about one serial number, two years after delivery. How long does the answer take? On paper, it takes days: someone pulls travelers out of storage, finds the test sheets, and rebuilds the history by hand.
With Andea GridUp, it takes minutes: pull the serial number, and the system reads back the whole build, every operation, the operator who ran it, and each recorded result, on a color-coded timeline you can export to Excel or PDF.
That's the difference between a quick, defensible answer and a scramble through old paper. For a maker of high-voltage equipment, it's the difference between having an exportable record from the moment of build and hoping the file still exists.
Most manufacturers face a choice that feels like it shouldn't exist. Build from a clean slate, and you get a system that fits your process exactly, but you don't have a year or the budget to spend figuring out what it should do while orders back up. Buy a generic prebuilt MES, and you move fast, but you inherit a jack-of-all-trades tool built for no plant in particular, and you end up bending your process to fit software that was never built for how you actually work.
Andea GridUp exists because that choice shouldn't be necessary. We put our most experienced architects on building the 80% of an MES that every electrical equipment plant genuinely needs, ETO routing, in-process quality capture, unit build history, ERP and PLM integration, on a platform built for flexibility, not a rigid, one-size-fits-all product. You get the speed of prebuilt and the adaptability of a platform, without paying for one at the cost of the other.
That's the difference between Andea GridUp and a generic prebuilt MES. A generic product is built to be broadly acceptable across industries, which means it's rarely built well for any one of them, and an electrical equipment plant configures around gaps a transformer or switchgear maker shouldn't have to explain to their vendor in the first place. Andea GridUp starts from a system that already understands a transformer. And because it's built on a genuinely flexible foundation, when your plant needs something beyond the 80%, that's a configuration, not a limitation, done by Andea's architects, not a workaround your team has to invent on their own.
Most electrical equipment makers already run ERP and PLM. The gap usually sits at the shop floor, the layer that turns a plan into an operator's next step
| Type | What it does | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| ERP | Enterprise Resource Planning. Runs orders, finance, procurement, and inventory. | Back office |
| MRP | Material Requirements Planning. Turns the bill of materials into purchasing and material plans. | Planning |
| MES | Manufacturing Execution System. Drives the build, enforces quality and test, records traceability in real time. | Shop floor |
| PLM | Product Lifecycle Management. Holds drawings, revisions, and engineering change. | Engineering |
| SCADA / IIoT | Reads machine signals and process data from equipment on the line. | Machine layer |
An ERP plans the business. An MES runs the build. They answer different questions, and an electrical equipment plant needs both.
Engineer-to-order work makes this split matter more, because the routing changes with every order. An ERP records the plan, but it doesn't enforce the routing, capture the inline test, or hold a failed unit on the floor, that's execution, not planning.
Andea GridUp is the execution layer: it reads the order, bill of materials, and master data from your ERP, then writes results back, so the two systems stay in sync without anyone keying data twice.
Most systems fail on the same two: engineer-to-order routing and in-process quality capture, the areas a back-office system like ERP was never built to handle.
When you line up systems for an electrical equipment plant, evaluate vendors against the eight criteria below. Andea GridUp clears all eight out of the box.
Handles engineer-to-order routing, where the build changes with each order
Captures the quality tests your standards require as part of execution, and flags non-conformances
Builds unit-level genealogy tied to the serial number
Produces exportable records for your audits and standards reporting
Reads from and writes back to your existing ERP and PLM
Ships configured for electrical work, so rollout runs in months
Shows real-time floor status across builds that last months
Tracks operator skills for HV and coil work
Andea GridUp is new. The team behind it isn't. Andea has been building and running manufacturing execution systems for over a decade, with core architects whose experience reaches back to the enterprise MES platforms that shaped the field. They took what they learned across the shop floor and pre-configured it specifically for electrical equipment plants
An ERP plans the business: orders, cost, inventory, ship dates. An MES runs the build on the floor: it drives the routing, captures each test, and records traceability as it happens. They connect, so the MES reads the order from the ERP and writes results back.
No. Design tools like ECAD or EDA produce drawings and engineering data. Manufacturing software, an MES specifically, builds the product those drawings describe, enforces its tests, and records what happened. The two connect through PLM, but they do different jobs.
It supports discrete manufacturing, specifically engineer-to-order (ETO) and make-to-order (MTO) work, where each unit carries its own routing, drawing, and test plan, the norm for transformers and switchgear.
Months, instead of years. A clean-slate build spends its first year deciding what the system should do. Around 80% of what an electrical equipment plant needs, ETO routing, in-process quality, ERP and PLM integration, ships already configured, so the project tunes a working system to your plant instead of starting from scratch.
It captures quality results as the work happens, evaluates each against its limits, flags non-conformances for supervisor review, and ties every result to the serial number. The records export for your audits and standards reporting.
In our experience, around 80% of what a typical electrical equipment plant needs is configuration, not custom build: setting up your routings, your BOMs, and your test plans inside the modules that already exist. The remaining 20% depends on your specific setup, typically custom integration points and processes unique to your plant or end market. That last 20% is also where Andea's architects get involved directly.
Neither extreme. Andea GridUp ships with the routines, quality checks, and traceability an electrical equipment plant already needs, so you're not reshaping your process to fit generic software. Because it's built on a flexible platform, it also adapts to your routings, your tests, and your integrations, instead of forcing you into someone else's rigid workflow.
That's what the remaining 20% is for. Andea's architects, the same team that built the electrical-specific foundation, work directly with your plant to model whatever falls outside the out-of-the-box modules, whether a custom integration, a unique process, or an end-market requirement.
Yes, it can be rolled out in phases. It's worth understanding the trade-off first: a typical routing touches multiple production areas, and data captured in one area often feeds how another runs. That's why Andea's architects run a Blueprinting phase before rollout, mapping a sequence that fits your plant while respecting how the modules depend on each other.
Andea GridUp isn't limited to a predefined set of systems on any layer. We've built integrations with major ERP platforms like SAP and Oracle, mid-market systems like Infor LN and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and PLM systems including Teamcenter, ENOVIA, and Arena. On the machine side, we typically recommend integrating through an OPC-UA layer, and can connect directly to a machine when required. Over 25+ years we've developed a library of prebuilt interfaces we draw on, combined with modern integration mechanisms suited to your systems.
Total cost has a few components: the software, plus configuration, customization, implementation, deployment, and post-go-live services. Software pricing is based on sites, modules, and users or machine connections, and can be a perpetual license or a subscription. Services are scoped during the Blueprinting phase. You'll also choose deployment: on-premise on your own hardware, or hosted in a private cloud. Because pricing depends on your sites, modules, users, and deployment, we don't publish a fixed price list.
Yes. Each unit runs against its own routing and process sheet, pulled from its order and bill of materials, so operators always see the correct current instructions for the specific unit in front of them, even when different orders run side by side.
Yes. It supports multi-site and multi-plant deployments, a consistent system and single source of truth across sites, which matters as much for manufacturers standing up new capacity as for those running multiple existing plants.
Andea GridUp itself is new, our first implementation is already underway. The team behind it isn't new: Andea has been building and running MES systems since 2014, with architects whose experience goes back further still. Across more than 90 manufacturers and 25+ years of combined experience, Andea GridUp is that know-how pre-configured for electrical equipment plants. We're currently selecting a small number of manufacturers for a pilot program at preferential terms, ask us if you're interested.
Tell us about your plant and we'll build the demo around it. You see the parts that matter to how you actually work.
