Building an ERP System in Arezzo

One of the more unusual projects in my career. Bacio Italy, a jewelry manufacturer based in Arezzo in Tuscany, needed a system to control their entire operation: supply chain, stock management, dealer network, orders, and production processes.

The work

I built a web-based ERP/CRM application to handle all of it. The work was done on-site at their office in Arezzo. Two weeks in Italy, a few days home in Denmark, then back to Italy. For months.

Arezzo is in the heart of Tuscany. The jewelry district there's one of the largest in Europe. The manufacturing processes are complex: raw materials sourcing, multiple production stages, quality control, dealer distribution across Europe. Each step needs tracking and coordination.

The system

The ERP handled the full lifecycle: incoming materials, production scheduling, stock levels, dealer orders, shipping, and invoicing. Standard scope for an ERP, but built from scratch as a web application because the off-the-shelf systems didn't fit their specific workflow. Jewelry manufacturing has enough domain-specific requirements that generic ERP solutions created more friction than they solved.

What happened

Bacio Italy went bankrupt before the system was fully deployed. The project ended abruptly. The code, the months of work, the deep understanding of jewelry manufacturing processes - all shelved.

What I took away

It was an expensive lesson in client risk. Building months of custom work for a single client with no diversification is a gamble. When they go under, everything goes with them.

But the time wasn't wasted. Building an ERP from scratch taught me about domain modeling, complex business logic, and the gap between what a client says they need and what their processes actually require. Those two things are rarely the same, and discovering the difference is where the real engineering happens.

And I got to spend months in Tuscany, which softened the blow.