Warkworth · Auckland · New Zealand
ExcelLane builds automation and custom software for New Zealand manufacturers, distributors and operations teams. Our engineers came out of semiconductor R&D and research physics — we have spent our careers making complicated systems behave.
A spreadsheet that three people maintain and nobody trusts. Orders retyped out of email and into the system. A month-end that swallows four days. Reports assembled by hand because two systems will not talk to each other.
None of this appears as a line item in your accounts, which is exactly why it survives. It is usually one of the largest costs in an operation — and it is fixable.
What we do
We are a small senior team. That means you deal directly with the people writing the code, and we take on work we know we can finish.
Software that does the repetitive work — reliably, overnight, without complaint. We build automation purpose-fitted to your process, rather than selling you a licence you then have to bend your process around.
Web applications and internal systems built to fit your operation exactly. Python and Django on the back end, Next.js on the front, PostgreSQL underneath — proven, maintainable, and yours.
Most businesses do not need new systems. They need the ones they already have to talk to each other, and they need to trust the numbers that come out.
A straight assessment of where technology is costing you money and where it could make you some. We have done this for organisations from twenty staff to a thousand.
Where we do our best work
Those three patterns are where automation pays for itself fastest, and they turn up in very different industries. In practice that means sectors like these.
Production control, scheduling, MRP, batch records, quality and traceability.
Batch production, recipe and formulation control, compliance records, multi-site trading data.
Point-of-sale consolidation, daily reporting, and staff rostering built from forecast demand.
Order processing, stock movement, pricing, supplier and customer integration.
Storefront builds, order and fulfilment automation, inventory synchronisation.
Job and time tracking, document generation, billing and client reporting.
Who actually does the work
The people you meet in the first conversation are the people who design and build the system. There is nobody else here to pass it to.
Director & Chief Technology Officer
Based in Warkworth. Most recently Chief Technology Officer of Qarma Technology, a quantitative finance firm in London. Before that, nine years at Foster Moore — a leading global supplier of government registry systems — as both a development team leader and a senior systems engineer, on platforms serving national governments at millions of users and 24×7 uptime. Earlier work spans network analysis, telecommunications, retail payments and a mission-critical production workflow system for Tetra Pak, across New Zealand, the UK and the United States.
He began as a research physicist in quantum optics at the University of Southern California, with nine peer-reviewed journal papers to his name — three of them in Physical Review Letters.
Principal Engineer
PhD in Physics from the University of Tokyo. Fifteen years as a design engineer at Toshiba and the Toshiba–SanDisk joint venture in Japan and California, working on 3D NAND, ReRAM and SRAM — 26 granted US patents, four further published applications, and five papers at ISSCC, the leading conference in solid-state circuits. He led the test engineering team through first silicon on a 32Gb ReRAM device. Since 2018 he has built factory production-control systems, MRP, scheduling algorithms and bespoke automation for businesses across Japan.
“There are plenty of people who can build you a website. There are very few who have taped out a 32-gigabit memory chip and then written your production scheduler.”
Delivery partnership
ExcelLane works in partnership with Greemin-Bigwell, a software engineering company in Numazu, Japan, where Takahiko is Vice President. A project here is not capped by the size of a small New Zealand team — we can draw on engineers who have been building production systems together for years.
You deal with us. One contract, one point of contact, scoped and managed here. The partnership is how the work gets resourced, not something you have to manage.
Japan runs at UTC+9 to our UTC+12. The working days overlap almost entirely, so questions get answered the same day rather than waiting overnight — which is rarely true of offshore delivery.
Seven production systems delivered since 2019, from MRP and production scheduling through to multi-tenant platforms with subscription billing.
How we work
Most failed software projects fail the same way: eighteen months of building, then a launch nobody wants. We do the opposite — five stages, and you can stop after any one of them.
A free thirty-minute conversation. You describe what is slowing you down; we tell you straight whether it is something we can help with. No charge, no obligation.
About a day, spent properly understanding how the work flows, where the hours go and what the data does. You finish with a written assessment and a costed recommendation.
One or two weeks, fixed price. The point is to demonstrate capability, not to build a scale model — we take the part of the problem that looks hardest and show you it can be solved.
Delivered in stages you can see and use as they land, so value starts arriving long before the project finishes.
We stay on. The systems we build are still running years later, and we are still the ones looking after them.
Selected work
Proof beats adjectives. A sample of the systems we have designed, built and still look after today.
Hospitality & brewing · Japan · Partner-delivered
GKB is one of Japan’s largest pub breweries — a craft brewing and hospitality group in Gotemba, Shizuoka, running a brewery of roughly 400,000 litres a year alongside a group of restaurants. Trading data from every site’s point-of-sale system was being gathered and re-keyed by hand to produce the daily reports management ran the business on.
Greemin-Bigwell replaced that with automation. Software visits each system overnight, retrieves the data and compiles the report itself. The manual pass disappeared — and the transcription errors went with it, so accuracy improved sharply at the same time as the effort fell away.
The group came back. A second system now builds staff rosters for GKB Cafe, a sister company under the same parent, generating schedules from sales forecasts to hold labour cost down. Both systems are maintained by the team that built them, so ongoing cost to the group stays small.
Manufacturing · Skincare
CoSkin is a therapeutic skincare and aromatherapy producer. We built and run the systems behind the bench: a structured formulation database that generates batch weigh-sheets automatically, versioned production runsheets covering the full product range, and a FileMaker stock and retail backend working alongside the Shopify storefront. Change a formulation and the paperwork the operator works from changes with it — no re-keying, no stale spreadsheets, and traceability on every batch.
Financial technology · London
Alistair was Chief Technology Officer of Qarma Technology from 2021 to 2026, leading in-house development of the platform that generates their trading signals for larger-scale investment clients. A multi-repository Python and Django system on PostgreSQL and AWS, with versioned release branches, a full pytest suite and automated deployment. It includes a price-event audit engine that finds and repairs corporate-action errors across international equity data — the kind of silent data fault that quietly corrupts every calculation downstream of it.
Manufacturing · Japan · With our partner firm
A web platform for planning, monitoring and controlling manufacturing — resources, schedules and workflows — with the MRP and production-scheduling algorithms designed and written from scratch rather than assembled from libraries. First delivered in 2019, then rebuilt from 2024 as a multi-tenant system serving several manufacturers from one deployment. Full traceability made standard ORM writes too slow, so the data-access layer was replaced with a purpose-built library — a substantial gain in throughput.
Professional services · New Zealand
A New Zealand practice was spending several days each month manually assigning and reviewing unposted accounting transactions. We replaced the manual pass with a rule-driven engine that runs unattended against their accounting system, with a dry-run mode so every change can be checked before it is committed. Staff now see only the exceptions.
Rosters restaurant and part-time staff against forecast demand, with separate manager and employee interfaces, attendance tracking and recurring card payments.
Django · Stripe · AlgorithmsTwo-way communication between a city government and local small businesses — questions, answers and administrative collaboration in one place.
Next.js · Django REST FrameworkVideo-based staff training with per-employee progress tracking and subscription payments, running on cloud infrastructure.
Django · GCP · VimeoRecords building-material measurements against customer orders and generates the regulatory reports automatically, with tiered storage for high-resolution imagery.
Django · ReportLab · GCPDelivered by our partner engineering team in Japan, 2019 to present. Client names available on request.
Get in touch
If something in your operation is eating time that it should not, tell us about it. The first conversation costs nothing and takes half an hour — and you will get a straight answer about whether we can help.