The local business fabric
La Louvière is the capital of the Centre, the slice of Hainaut that coal created and that the end of coal forced to reinvent itself. Steel is still here — the La Louvière rolling mill remains one of the region's major industrial employers — but the bulk of the fabric today is the layer of SMEs orbiting it: boilermaking, machining, maintenance, haulage, structural steel, subcontractors whose order book depends on two or three clients. The town also has a history of its own: the Boch earthenware works, remembered in the Keramis museum, and the Canal du Centre with its UNESCO-listed hydraulic boat lifts, now bypassed by the nearby Strépy-Thieu funicular lift, one of the tallest in the world. Around that canal a multimodal logistics cluster has grown, notably on the Garocentre platform. What these companies share: they know how to produce, yet they still run their quotes, workshop schedules and timesheets on spreadsheets and paper.
How we work here
For an industrial SME in the Centre, the website is almost never the emergency — the workshop is. So we start by coming to see how you actually work: how a quote goes out, how an order becomes a production job, where the hours leak away. Then we build the missing tool: production tracking, quotes and work orders, workshop scheduling, a mobile app for teams on site, a portal where your client can see progress without phoning you. We connect these tools to your accounting and to your ERP where one exists, rather than adding yet another separate piece of software. That tool is custom work, and it starts at €99/month over 12 months, or €79/month on a 24-month commitment. The showcase site comes afterwards, at €29/month all-in on the same commitment — that is not where the money should go. La Louvière is about 45 minutes from our Brussels office via the E19 and A501: we come and scope on site, in your own premises, and the quote, free and within 24 hours, says exactly what your tool will cost above that floor.
