This paper describes the steps that an engineered-to-order SME firm took to identify their requirements for a shopfloor Manufacturing Execution System (MES). The firm had limited experience and followed a hybrid Design Thinking/Lean approach to develop and test use cases that could be reviewed with stakeholders in the factory to confirm their value in supporting the critical economical outcomes of single piece flow in the factory. The firm created a set of requirements based on use cases and a roadmap for the further development of the MES. During the investigation, the foundation work necessary to develop a shopfloor platform was supported by a digital maturity assessment tool. The higher-level analytical micro-services were dependent on easily accessible transactional data from the system. The work’s limitations are that implementation is not part of this study and that the approach taken must be compared with more traditional approaches.