Manufacturing
Most of what limits a shop is not machine time — it is the paper around the machine time. Quotes that sit for days because one person has to touch every one. Prints and BOMs checked by memory. Work instructions that live in somebody’s head and walk out the door with them. That work is document-shaped, repeatable, and almost entirely invisible in the ERP.
What this looks like in practice.
Quoting and RFQ flow
The most common first project, and usually the most valuable. An RFQ arrives as an email, a PDF, a portal notification, or a print. Someone reads it, decides whether it is worth quoting, hunts for a comparable past job, checks material and capacity, and writes it up. Almost every one of those steps is retrievable from work you have already done — if the system can read your history. The result is not just faster quoting; it is more consistent quoting, with the reasoning written down.
Print, BOM, and spec validation
Checking a revision against a bill of materials, catching a tolerance that changed between revs, flagging a spec callout that does not match what the traveler says. This is exactly the kind of checking that is tedious for a person, easy to rush at 4:45, and expensive when it is missed.
Work instructions and tribal knowledge
The setup that only one person knows how to do. Capturing it properly has always been the right idea and always lost to the next hot job. Structured capture makes it tractable — and once it is written down, it is also readable by the agents doing everything else.
Overnight document runs
Reporting, reconciliation, and data movement between systems that do not talk. The work happens while the building is empty and is waiting when the first shift walks in. Unattended runs never bill an hour.
ERP-adjacent, not ERP-replacing
Nobody wants a second system of record. The work sits alongside what you already run — reading from it, writing back where that is safe, and leaving the ERP as the ERP.
Every engagement is scoped independently.
There is no fixed package and no published price, because the right scope genuinely differs every time. What is consistent is the sequence — and that the first step costs nothing.
A conversation, no charge
What are you trying to do better? Usually the honest answer is a specific process that has been annoying for years. We talk through what actually happens in it — what arrives, who touches it, what comes out, how often. If nothing here is worth your money, that is a fine outcome and you will hear it plainly.
A day on site
Half to a full day with the owner and two or three operators at their desks — watching the real work, not a description of it. Baselines get measured rather than estimated. You get a written plan with opportunities ranked in dollars, an honest list of what is not worth automating, and a first project recommendation. The plan is yours whether or not we continue.
The first process, built with your people in the room
One process, end to end, proven against the baseline. Your champion is in the room while it is built, not handed a manual afterward. The company brain gets stood up as this happens, because the first process is what fills it.
Then it is yours
The engagement is designed to end. Your people extend the system without us; a monthly measurement cadence is available if you want the next process built, but it is not a dependency we design in on purpose.
What we will tell you not to do.
Every assessment produces one of these. It is the most useful page in the deliverable and the fastest way to tell whether someone is selling you software or telling you the truth.
- A customer-facing chatbot on the website. It is the most requested first project and almost always the wrong one — it is high-visibility, low-value, and it fails in public.
- Anything that depends on data nobody actually maintains. If the source is wrong, the agent is confidently wrong faster.
- Processes that run twice a year. The setup cost will never come back.
- Work that genuinely needs a person’s judgment on every instance. Some checking is judgment, not checking.
Where this has actually been done.
The first manufacturing implementation runs inside a roughly 100-person precision manufacturer in West Michigan, on a standing weekly working session with the engineering champion — RFQ and quoting flow, nightly data movement between the ERP and local systems, work instructions, and a company brain built through engineering. Additional manufacturers are in review or discovery.
Clients are described without names. We do not publish a client name, a logo, or a result without their explicit sign-off, and we do not publish a number without a source.
Conversations are always free.
Tell us what your organization is trying to do better, and you will get a straight answer on whether these tools can move it — including when they cannot.