Digital solutions have the potential to drastically transform manufacturing operations, but smaller manufacturing businesses (SMEs) have been reluctant to adopt digital solutions due to perceived investment and upskilling costs. The Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring project was thus established to facilitate the process of digital solution adoption in manufacturing SMEs. To this end, a solution development approach was proposed including a graphical environment to support the design of affordable digital solutions. This paper discusses the concepts and methods underlying this graphical design environment, including its early implementation. A preliminary evaluation is also presented involving industrial user studies with SMEs