About the project
Nefab designs and builds custom industrial packaging — plywood transit cases, shipping crates, protective packaging — engineered to an exact load rather than picked off a shelf. M3 is the 2026 platform that carries one box's record from a design engineer's first draft to the version a machinist scans and builds on the shop floor.
Production platform
2026
Product design, UX/UI, Design system
Industrial packaging / manufacturing
The scenario
A box gets designed once. It shouldn't get re-explained five times after that.
Before M3, a custom transit case's story lived in five separate places — a CAD file, a spec sheet, a paper traveller on the shop floor, a spreadsheet tracking the order, and whatever a supervisor remembered from the morning briefing. M3 is a 2026 production platform built for Nefab Packaging's Tallinn operation to make it one traceable record instead.
The brief
One system, two very different work days.
Design engineer — needs a box's dimensions, materials, and approval status to be one traceable record, from first draft to the exact version a machinist ends up cutting.
Production operator — needs to scan a code, see exactly what's next, and confirm it's done, without opening a second app or asking what MO-2026-000184 actually means.
Production numbers a supervisor can act on, not just admire.
Throughput, efficiency, quality rate, and on-time delivery sit on one screen behind a plain-language callout — output improved by 18 units against the prior 30-day period — doing the interpretation a supervisor would otherwise do by eye, next to a delivery-risk flag that says why it matters.
A box lives as one versioned record, not a redrawn file each time.
BOX-000190 carries its own approval timeline — draft, review, confirmed — next to the exact spec panel a machinist reads on the floor: inner and outer dimensions, empty weight, fastener count. The record a design engineer approves is the same record production builds from, not a summary of it.
Three decisions
What one packaging record has to hold.
Every field is a real part, not a picture. Material, thickness, and dimensions live as structured data attached to the box record — the same data that ends up on the cut list, not a description written underneath a picture of one.
Versions, not overwrites. A box solution's staged approval — draft, review, confirmed, and beyond — keeps every prior version reachable, so a production question about which spec was actually approved has one answer, not a search through email.
One code links the drawing to the job. A confirmed box solution attaches directly to its manufacturing order, so the part list built at a design desk is the same part list a machinist scans on the floor.
The same workspace, sized for wherever the day happens.
Visual system
Signal Blue
#2F5AF0
The one accent across the whole platform — a primary button, an active state, a live status pill all read the same colour, whether you're on a workboard, a box record, or a phone screen.
Paper
#F7F9FC
The actual working surface — dashboards, tables, and the box editor sit on near-white, prioritising legibility under shop-floor lighting over atmosphere.
Ink
#0F1524
Primary text and the dark brand panel reserved for sign-in and marketing moments — the working product itself stays light on purpose.
Alert Rose
#E14876
Reserved for items that need a human decision — a missed deadline, an open non-conformance — so it never gets diluted by routine status updates.
Light by default. Every other case study on this site is dark-mode. M3 isn't — a production floor screen has to hold up under overhead fluorescent light, and a dark UI loses contrast exactly where a machinist needs it most.
What changed
Before. A box's story lived in five places — CAD file, spec sheet, paper traveller, spreadsheet, and a supervisor's memory — with no single record of what was actually approved or built.
Now. M3 keeps one traceable record from first draft to shipped order, with role-based access and a staged approval workflow replacing the paper traveller — the same login and the same record on a laptop, a workstation, or a phone.
Where it stands
A production system judged by whether the floor actually uses it, not by a demo.
This case study walks through M3's engineering workflow and design system using the same demo workspace available at nefab.uxui.ee (username demo, password demo). Details shown throughout are illustrative sample content from that protected demo environment, not a live client's real business data.
