Our principal, Dan Mindlin, administered Fourth Shift in a Cleveland spring plant and carried it through Y2K; our team has written against it, reported on it, and rebuilt shop-floor flow around it for twenty-five years since. Whether you need one stubborn thing fixed, a full business process review, or a straight answer about what comes next — you're talking to people who have lived inside the system.
Fourth Shift is a good system that stopped getting attention. Most of the value is still in there — it's just buried under a decade of drift, workarounds and departures.
We walk order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and plan-to-produce the way your people actually run them — not the way the manual says — and grade what we find by evidence. Details below.
MRP and planning parameters, master data cleanup, costing, GL module communication, a month-end that closes on schedule. Ongoing support on a fixed retainer that leaves your team more capable, not more dependent.
Unhappy with your current support? →Vendor scorecards, open-PO risk, lead-time drift, margin by the cut that matters — built read-only on the real database, warehoused so it doesn't slow the plant down.
Barcode data-collection scripts that make the right scan the easy scan, event monitoring that catches problems before the shift ends, physical inventory that reconciles to root cause.
Expert systems for the FS toolset → 05 / CONNECTPLM, CRM, EDI, e-invoicing, corporate Oracle or SAP feeds. Data Import templates, FSTI transactions, reconciled to root cause and monitored after go-live.
How we build integrations → 06 / ASSESSA fixed-scope evaluation of your technical environment and implementation — graded findings, a roadmap, and the quick wins you can take this quarter.
What the assessment covers → 07 / TRAINYour Fourth Shift expert left. One-on-one, role-based training for the new hire on your own system, with written work instructions you keep. The class the vendor can't fill anymore.
Fourth Shift training →Most process reviews end in a slide deck and a list of things everyone already suspected. Ours runs on the Transformation module we built into Clairvient — an engagement workspace that turns interviews, documents and your live data into findings you can defend and results you can measure.
Every finding carries an evidence grade. Observed in your transactions. Derived from them. Documented by your people. You always know how much weight a finding can bear before you act on it.
Every recommendation carries a measurement contract. What we expect to change, which GL accounts or operational measures will show it, and by when. Interest, debt, purchase price variance, freight, hours returned to the floor — mapped to your own chart of accounts.
The scoreboard keeps reading your data after we leave. If the improvement happened, the numbers say so. If it didn't, the numbers say that too, and we go back to the finding.
Two to three days on site or on calls. Process walks, interviews recorded and transcribed, your SOPs and work instructions loaded, a read-only extract of your FS data.
Where the process and the system disagree, where the workaround became the process, where one person is the control. Each finding tied to the evidence behind it.
Sequenced so each step pays for the next. Each one names the measure that will prove it and the accounts it will show up in.
Runs against your GL and operations data on a schedule. Management sees the debt paid down, the hours returned, the variance closed — in their own numbers.
Administrator, developer, integrator, BI builder, and — for two years at a $200M medical device manufacturer — the VP of Operations whose number depended on the system being right. We know what a wrong cost roll does to a quote, what an untrusted MRP does to a planner, and what a retirement does to a plant where one person held the whole thing together.
So when a number looks wrong, we can usually trace it to the transaction, and work shoulder to shoulder with your accountants and planners in their language until it's right. The goal is never to make you dependent on us. We document what we learn, build what your team can run, and measure success by how they do after we've stepped back.
Fourth Shift is a mature product at the end of its vendor roadmap — Infor's investment has, understandably, moved on to its current platforms, and the Fourth Shift-specific depth available through vendor channels has narrowed. The people who set your system up are retiring. The screens look like 1998 and the reporting stopped there too. And every ERP salesperson you meet has the same answer: a seven-figure migration and eighteen months of disruption.
There's another path. Keep the system that runs your plant — it works — and put a modern layer over it: validated dashboards, a morning digest that ranks what needs attention, shop-floor screens built around your workflow, and a clean, canonical data model that's ready if and when you do decide to move. That's what Clairvient is for.
With vendor support for Fourth Shift narrowing, many plants have ended up with a support arrangement that grows more complex and more expensive every year — every fix another custom program, every custom program another reason you can't leave — while nobody on the plant's side understands the system anymore.
We run the opposite model. Document your system, and hand you the documentation. Install monitoring your own IT can see. Stabilize and improve at the mechanism, with the simplest fix that holds. And if you want it, apply the Transformation module to make Fourth Shift work for the business again. Fixed monthly retainer, in writing, no lock-in — read-only first, in parallel with your existing arrangement until you're comfortable.
The month-end that won't close, the MRP that nobody trusts, the extract the parent company keeps rejecting, the retirement that takes the last person who knows how it all works. Bring the actual problem — we'd rather show you than tell you.
You'll get a straight answer and a tight scope. If we can't help, we'll tell you that too — and usually who can.
