crbnos

carbon: Manage Manufacturing Planning and Production

Carbon combines ERP, MRP, MES and QMS in a shared Postgres-backed system for manufacturing teams. It covers planning, shop-floor execution, quality and traceability, with cloud and self-hosted deployment options.

TypeScriptOther licenseManufacturingDatabaseSelf Hosted
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+69

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54/100

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53
Community
61
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21
Pull requests
79

+69 stars in the last 17 days

  • Merges more pull requests than 85% of the projects we track

Overview

Carbon is a manufacturing operations platform that brings business records, material planning, shop-floor execution and quality management together in one Postgres-backed system. It addresses the fragmentation that can occur when teams maintain separate tools for bills of materials, production, quality records and costs.

It is aimed at manufacturers with complex assembly, contract manufacturing, configure-to-order or high-mix, low-volume workflows. Teams can use Carbon Cloud or run it in their own infrastructure, and developers can integrate through its REST API and MCP server. See the repository and project site.

Key Features

  • Manage quotes, sales orders, purchasing, inventory, invoicing and actual job costs.
  • Plan material demand and production with versioned bills of materials, routings and finite-capacity scheduling.
  • Support shop-floor work through digital travelers, operator terminals, 3D instructions, barcode scanning and labor capture.
  • Record inspections, first article inspections, nonconformance, corrective actions and calibration.
  • Track lot and serial genealogy in both forward and backward directions.
  • Connect application workflows to typed REST operations, webhooks and a permission-aware MCP server.
  • Extend records with custom fields and integrate with listed tools including Onshape, SolidWorks, Jira and Slack.

Use Cases

  • Manufacturing planners can coordinate material availability and production schedules when orders depend on multi-level bills of materials.
  • Shop-floor supervisors can provide operators with digital travelers and capture labor and barcode events during production.
  • Quality teams can record inspections and nonconformance alongside the production records they relate to.
  • Operations teams can investigate a product issue by tracing lots and serials back to their sources or forward to affected units.
  • Engineering and IT teams can connect manufacturing records to other systems or automate permitted operations through the API or MCP server.

Getting Started

For local development, the README lists Docker, Node.js 22 and pnpm as prerequisites:

git clone https://github.com/crbnos/carbon.git && cd carbon
corepack enable && pnpm install
cp .env.example .env
pnpm dev

See the README for setup details, self-hosting, and deployment options.

Considerations

  • Local development boots a multi-service stack in Docker, including Postgres, Redis and supporting services. It is more involved than installing a standalone application.
  • The project combines many operational areas, so assess whether its manufacturing workflows and deployment model fit your organization before adopting it.
  • The repository describes an open-core license model: it states that most code is AGPLv3, while Enterprise files use the Carbon Commercial License. The input metadata reports the license as NOASSERTION, so verify the current license terms in the repository before use.
  • The README says API keys and MCP use in self-hosted deployments require a commercial license. The optional Rust assembler also needs native build dependencies if you need its CAD conversion and motion-planning endpoints.

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