How to Find Factory Customers for ERP, MES, and Other Industrial Software Sales: 83,000 Factories with 50–299 Insured Employees Across 8 Discrete-Manufacturing Industries

Lao Feng sells MES and implementation services in Suzhou. In previous years he focused on large factories with over a thousand employees, where every tender drew a long line of software vendors competing on price, the proposal went through revision after revision, and he often lost on price in the end. In the last two years he has shifted to component and equipment factories with one or two hundred employees: the owner makes the call directly, and what they want is a system that can reconcile orders, production scheduling, and inventory, with a short cycle and fast payment. The new problem is that these factories are numerous and scattered — he doesn't know where to pull the list from, and when he calls, plenty of owners hang up after one line: "Excel works fine for us."

Start with size: focus on factories with 50–299 insured employees

ERP manages orders, procurement, inventory, and costing; MES manages work orders, reporting, quality, and traceability on the shop floor. The factories that get the most use out of both systems are discrete-manufacturing factories that run multi-variety, multi-process, order-based production. On Tianxia Gongchang I picked 8 discrete-manufacturing industries — metal products; general equipment; special equipment; automobiles and auto parts; electrical machinery and equipment; computers, communications, and other electronic equipment; instruments and meters; and rubber and plastic products — and broke down active factories by insured headcount:

Factories with 50–299 insured employees number 83,298, 6.6 times the number with 300–999 insured employees. Within this tier, 79,061 factories — 94.9% — have been in business for more than 5 years.

What the three tiers buy is different:

• 20–49 insured employees: The owner alone handles orders and procurement, and the books go to an accountant — accounting software plus Excel is enough to keep things running. This tier has the largest number of factories and suits standardized inventory/sales/purchasing and cloud products sold at low unit prices on volume.
• 50–299 insured employees: The shop floor is split into several sections, with dedicated planners and warehouse staff. Once orders pick up, rush orders, material shortages, and mismatches between books and stock start to appear, and Excel begins to break down. The owner still makes the call directly, so the decision chain is short. A full ERP implementation plus shop-floor reporting closes most easily in this tier.
• 300–999 insured employees: These factories have often already implemented ERP, and what they need to buy is an upgrade/replacement, MES, or production scheduling — specialized items that have to go through the IT department and a tender process, with a long cycle and the fiercest competition.

Being in business for more than 5 years matters a lot. Once a factory has been operating for 5 years, its customers and processes are basically stable, and it has accumulated historical orders, bills of materials, and inventory data — there's something to enter into a system, and the owner is more willing to pay for being "in control."

By industry: general equipment, metal products, and special equipment lead

Breaking down factories with 50–999 insured employees by industry (a factory may belong to two industries at once, so the industry totals add up to more than the overall total):

Different industries have different first problems for the system to solve, and the demo needs to change accordingly:

• General equipment, special equipment: Many are engineer-to-order and make-to-order, with one bill of materials per machine and frequent design changes. Talk about project BOMs, change management, and project-based costing.
• Automobiles and auto parts: OEMs typically require parts to be traceable to batch and process step, so MES traceability and quality records are the door-opener. On how certification pushes factories to fill in the records, see How to Find Factory Customers Selling Management-System Certification Consulting.
• Computers, communications, and other electronic equipment: Many material types, many substitute parts, and frequent line changeovers — talk about material kitting completeness and error-proofed material feeding.
• Rubber and plastics, metal products: Lots of injection-molding machines, stamping presses, and machining equipment, with many outsourced processes — talk about equipment connectivity, mold management, and outsourcing tracking.

By city: Dongguan, Suzhou, and Shenzhen together total 16,903

ERP and MES implementation requires consultants to be on-site. In cities where customers are clustered, one consultant can run several projects at once, and it's easy to bring a new customer to see an existing customer's site. Here are the top 15 cities for factories with 50–999 insured employees across these 8 industries:

Dongguan, Suzhou, and Shenzhen together total 16,903 factories, 17.6% of the 95,838 factories with 50–999 insured employees across these 8 industries; the top 15 cities together total 44,457, or 46.4%. Grouped by region:

• The Pearl River Delta: the five cities of Dongguan, Shenzhen, Foshan, Guangzhou, and Zhongshan total 17,243.
• Su-Xi-Chang: the three cities of Suzhou, Wuxi, and Changzhou total 10,709.
• Zhejiang: the four cities of Ningbo, Wenzhou, Taizhou, and Hangzhou total 9,172.

Chongqing and Chengdu in the west also made the top 15. Implementation services spread by word of mouth — build two or three reference customers in one city first, then bring factories from the same industrial zone to see them on-site, and you save on the consultant's travel and on-site time.

The policy angle: city pilots and Little Giants

City pilots. In June 2023 the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice (Caijian [2023] No. 117) launching an SME digital-transformation city pilot program in three batches from 2023 to 2025: about 30 cities in the first batch, about 35 in the second (Caibanjian [2024] No. 23), and about 34 in the third (Caibanjian [2025] No. 20). Central finance gives pilot cities a fixed reward — up to RMB 150 million for provincial capitals, cities with independent planning status, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and up to RMB 100 million for other prefecture-level cities and the districts/counties under municipalities directly under the central government — with each city's pilot period running two years from the date its implementation plan is approved. Third-batch cities were selected in 2025, so this is exactly the time projects are being pushed forward.

The 2025–2027 SME Digitalization Special Action Plan, issued in December 2024 by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Finance, the People's Bank of China, and the National Financial Regulatory Administration (Gongxinbulianqiye [2024] No. 239), is more specific: it supports pilots in about 100 cities in batches, aiming to drive digital transformation at more than 40,000 SMEs, including 10,000 specialized SMEs; by 2027, digital retrofitting of specialized SMEs is to be completed for every enterprise that should be retrofitted, the CNC penetration rate for key processes at above-designated-size industrial SMEs nationwide is to reach 75%, and the SME cloud-adoption rate is to exceed 40%.

An earlier document named MES specifically. The Guidelines for SME Digital Transformation (MIIT General Office document Gongxintingxinfa [2022] No. 33), issued in November 2022 by the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, states: "Apply digital products such as cloud-based Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) to optimize the allocation of production and manufacturing resources and achieve flexible production on demand."

Little Giants. The action plan above has a clause written specifically for Little Giants: "Build a complete profile for every 'Little Giant' specialized SME, and use a one-enterprise-one-policy approach to systematically and specifically drive up its level of digitalization." On Tianxia Gongchang, active manufacturing factories carrying the "Little Giant" specialized-SME tag number 13,273, of which 11,737 — 88.4% — have 50–999 insured employees. By province, Jiangsu has 2,412, Zhejiang 1,662, Guangdong 1,258, and Shandong 1,117, with Jiangsu and Zhejiang together accounting for 30.7%; by industry (with overlap), the top four are special equipment (2,650), general equipment (2,378), computers/communications/electronics (2,284), and electrical machinery (1,723) — all falling within the 8 industries above.

One more detail: Caijian [2023] No. 117 specifies that "Little Giant" specialized SMEs that have already received central-finance SME development special funds will not receive duplicate support from the pilot funds. Before pitching a proposal to a Little Giant, find out which funding it has already received.

Four things to nail down on the first call

1. What they currently use to manage orders and inventory: accounting software plus Excel, or an ERP system already implemented and running for several years. The former is a pitch for a new implementation; the latter is a pitch for a replacement or an added MES — the quote and implementation timeline are entirely different.
2. Who schedules production, and how often rush orders disrupt it: a planner scheduling in Excel who gets thrown off by rush orders several times a week is exactly the entry point for MES and a scheduling system. If the answer is "the boss schedules it in the group chat," management is still running on someone watching over people.
3. Whether the factory has anyone to support the implementation: is there a dedicated IT/informatization lead, and who does the owner plan to put in charge. Projects with no internal point person run long and get bogged down in disputes at acceptance — budget more person-days for them.
4. Whether there are local digital-retrofit subsidies, and whether the factory has applied: whether the city is in the pilot program, whether the industrial park offers a retrofit subsidy, and whether the factory has been entered into the Little Giant profile registry. Factories that already understand the policy and are already in line move much faster on the decision.

When's the best time to make this call? A factory hiring for an IT/informatization role, one that just brought a new production line online, or one that just replaced a batch of equipment are all windows — see Methodology Lesson 7: When Factories Are Most Likely to Buy — Watch These 6 Demand-Window Signals. When new equipment has just arrived, equipment connectivity and shop-floor reporting are a ready-made entry point; for how the equipment payment gets structured, see How to Find Factory Customers Selling Equipment Finance Leasing and Equipment Loans.

A sequence you can run right now

1. Circle the industries first: pick two or three of the 8 industries where you already have successful cases, and prepare a demo environment and case studies for each.
2. Then circle the size: on Tianxia Gongchang, filter by industry plus insured headcount, starting with 50+ insured employees. Take Suzhou as an example — for general-equipment and special-equipment factories with 50+ insured employees, you can filter directly using this list; or you can ask the AI on Tianxia Gongchang: "Suzhou general-equipment and special-equipment factories with 50+ insured employees," and it will break the conditions into filters and list out the factories.
3. Layer on Little Giants: ask the AI "Jiangsu's 'Little Giant' specialized-SME factories" — this group of factories has policy support pushing them forward, so put them at the top of the list.
4. Check the city: confirm whether the customer's city is in one of the three pilot batches, and how the local implementation rules subsidize whom — defer to the actual documents from the local MIIT and finance bureaus.
5. Line up reference sites by city: fully develop two or three reference customers in one city first, then bring factories from the same industrial zone to see them on-site.

In your list, how many fall in the 50–299 insured-employee tier

Open your current customer list and count by insured headcount: how many fall in the 50–299 tier? Which cities are these factories spread across, and how many of those cities are among the three batches of SME digital-transformation pilot cities? If the first number is small and you can't answer the second question, where — which city, which industry — will you pull your next list from?

→ Filter Tianxia Gongchang for factories with 50+ insured employees across these 8 discrete-manufacturing industries | → Get a Tianxia Gongchang membership

Published by the Tianxia Gongchang Research Institute. Data notes: factory counts are from Tianxia Gongchang, covering manufacturing factories in active status, as of September 2026; the "Little Giant" specialized-SME tag is a factory tag on Tianxia Gongchang; city pilot policy is from the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology notice (Caijian [2023] No. 117, June 2023) and the second- and third-batch pilot notices (Caibanjian [2024] No. 23 and Caibanjian [2025] No. 20); the special action plan is from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Finance, People's Bank of China, and National Financial Regulatory Administration (Gongxinbulianqiye [2024] No. 239, December 2024); the Guidelines for SME Digital Transformation is from the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (Gongxintingxinfa [2022] No. 33, November 2022).