We build the office behind a job shop: quotes that come from your real costs and go out in hours, orders that become jobs with routings and due dates, inventory and purchasing that stay ahead of the floor, and a shop report that tells you the margin on every job. Connected to QuickBooks and your existing systems, at a fixed price, then kept running.
Machine shops · fabricators · small plants · job shops
Shops are good at making things. The time disappears around the making: quoting, chasing, re-keying and finding out too late which jobs made money.
RFQs wait for the owner. Quotes are built in a spreadsheet from memory, and the ones that go quiet are forgotten.
RFQs land in one queue; a quote is drafted from your material, machine and labour rates for you to adjust and approve; it goes out the same day and is followed up until the customer decides. Won quotes become orders without re-typing.
Email and customer portals, your pricing sheets, QuickBooks, e-signatureThe whiteboard knows the schedule. When the whiteboard is wrong, the customer finds out first.
Each order becomes a job with its steps, materials and due date, visible on the floor and in the office. Status updates come from the people doing the work, on a tablet, in seconds.
Tablets on the floor, barcode or QR labels, your ERP or spreadsheetsA job stops because a $40 part was not ordered. Someone drives to the supplier.
Stock levels update as jobs consume material; reorder drafts are prepared at the thresholds you set and sent when you approve. Supplier confirmations and ETAs land against the job that needs them.
Supplier portals and email, barcode scanning, QuickBooksYou know revenue; margin by job and by customer arrives weeks later, if at all.
Time, material and purchases roll up to each job as they happen. A weekly report shows margin by job, customer and machine, and flags the ones drifting before they finish.
QuickBooks, time capture on the floor, your purchasing recordsThree steps, each priced before it starts. You can stop after any of them and keep everything.
Half a day with you and your office. We map how work actually moves, put a dollar figure on the three biggest leaks, build a working prototype of one workflow and quote the build at a fixed price. The fee is credited to the build.
The agreed system goes live in phases, with your team trained on each one. Scope is what the diagnosis said; anything new goes through a written change request, so the price holds.
We watch it, fix it when a vendor changes something, and send a monthly report with the numbers. Improvements ship every month. Cancel with 30 days' notice; everything stays yours.
A worked example with sample numbers. Your diagnosis replaces these with yours.
Take a 14-person fabrication shop quoting about 30 jobs a week and winning a third. Suppose quotes take a day and a half to go out and roughly two a week are lost simply because a competitor answered first. At an average job of $3,800 and a 30% margin, that is about $2,300 of margin a week.
Suppose the floor stops twice a week for a missing part, costing an hour of two people each time. At $45 an hour loaded, that is $180 a week, plus the delivery dates it slips.
And the owner spends about eight hours a week on quoting and chasing. Handing back half of that is time spent on customers and the next machine, which does not fit on a line of this table.
The three things owners ask us about before anything else, answered in writing.
The code, the data and every account are yours from day one. Leave whenever you like and take all of it with you.
Nothing your customers see goes out without someone on your side signing off. The system drafts; people decide.
Every workflow is monitored. When a vendor changes something and a step fails, we get the alert and fix it, usually before anyone notices.
No, it is the usual starting point. We build the quoting, job tracking and inventory layer on top of what you have and connect it to QuickBooks, so nothing is re-keyed and you do not have to buy an ERP to get organised.
That is the design test. Updates are a tap on a tablet or a scan of a label, in the language the crew uses. If a step takes longer than it saves, we remove it.
The system drafts from your rates and history; a person adjusts and approves. It gets the first 80% right so you spend your time on the 20% that needs judgement. Pricing for the build is fixed after the diagnosis.
If you have one and it works, we connect to it. If you have one that nobody uses, the diagnosis is where we decide together whether to revive it or replace the pieces you need.
You do. Code, data and accounts are in your name from day one, with documentation so any engineer can maintain it.
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Tell us what is slowing your shop down. You talk to the person who would build it, and leave with a clear next step either way.
