One live system, on the ERP the shop already owned.
A weld and machine shop in the upper Midwest runs a full machining and fabrication floor with hundreds of jobs open at any time. The ERP held all of it and almost none of it was reaching the people doing the work. Nothing was replaced. The data that was already being paid for was put in front of the floor, the office and the owner, in one place.
The shop
Machining and fabrication under one roof: saw, laser, waterjet, press brake, weld cells, CNC mills and lathes, deburr, and outside coating. Work arrives as customer drawings and repeat part numbers, is quoted by a small estimating team, and moves through eight to ten operations before it ships. The company had used the same ERP for years. It was accurate, it was current, and it was effectively invisible once a job left the office.
The owner's problem was not a lack of software. It was that every question worth asking, what will this cost, when can we promise it, where is it right now, took somebody walking the floor to answer.
What was wrong
Pricing a drawing took days and depended on two people who had seen the part before. When they were busy, quotes sat. When they were away, quotes stopped.
Lead times were given from feel rather than from load. The floor absorbed the difference, and the jobs that slipped were discovered late.
Job status lived on a whiteboard, in a traveller, or in somebody's head. Finding a part meant walking the building. Supervisors spent their day being asked where things were.
Estimated against actual hours was known once the job closed and was invoiced. By then the same part had already been quoted again at the same price.
What was built
Twelve systems, in order of payback, each reading the ERP's own database on a schedule and writing nothing back to it. The first one was live inside the first month.
Every open job on one board by stage and work center, moving as the floor scans. Today, this week, next week and backlog, with the late ones marked.
A model trained on the shop's own quoting and job history prices an unfamiliar part from its features, past performance on similar work, and current material cost.
A load curve built from the ERP's schedule data, so a promise date is checked against the hours that genuinely exist at the work center that sets it.
What each machine is running and how far through it is, and what each person is on, with hours against estimate updating through the shift.
Operators scan a job at each operation. Location, custody and stage stay current without anyone maintaining a board.
Cost accumulating against the quote while the job runs, and an incentive calculation from estimated against actual hours that the people earning it can check themselves.
Also built: a sales desk for quote and lead follow-up, a management dashboard, a cash forecast from committed orders and agreed terms, a repeat-work view that groups the same customer and part number so one setup covers several jobs, written procedures for each routine, and a role and access model so each screen shows one job's worth of information.
How the engagement ran
- On site, in the operationTime on the floor with the owner, the estimators, the supervisor and the operators. Which ERP, how the data is stored, and what could be reached.
- A written plan and the project scopeThe workflow the shop should run on, the full scope laid out piece by piece, the most important work taken first, and the cost of each piece stated before anything was built.
- Built on site, highest payback firstEach system built against the live ERP and reviewed with the people who would use it while it was still easy to change.
- Trained at their own stationsOperators, estimators, schedulers and office staff trained on live jobs, at the screens they would actually use, not in one handover meeting.
- Documented and ownedWritten procedures for every routine, a named owner for each system, and a scheduled review against the measures set in the plan.
Where it stands
What the shop owns at the end
- The source code for every system built
- All of the data, in their own database
- Written procedures for each routine
- A named owner for every screen
- No licence, no per-seat fee, no subscription
- The original ERP, untouched and still the system of record
The client is not named and no customer, commercial or operating figures of theirs appear here. Screens shown elsewhere on this site use illustrative data. What is described is the scope of the work Nextrun carried out.
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