The platform

Start with one module. Not a two-year project.

Shop-floor execution, MRO purchasing, maintenance and production planning, built as separate modules for small discrete manufacturers. Turn on the one that is costing you money. Add the rest when it has earned it.

How it is put together

Most shop-floor software is sold as a suite you commit to before you know whether it works. You buy the whole thing, you run the project, and a year and a half later you find out which half of it the floor actually uses.

This is built the other way around. There is a thin base — jobs, work centers, people, permissions, notifications — and everything else is a module that switches on. Each one stands on its own and is priced on its own. A shop with a purchasing problem and nothing else buys purchasing and nothing else.

Two things follow from that. You can start somewhere small enough to actually measure. And when a module does not pay for itself, you turn it off instead of defending it.

Built from having run the place

None of this was specified by someone who had read about a machine shop. It comes out of running plants — carrying the pager, arguing the capex, explaining the late shipment to the customer who did not want to hear it. That shows up in small decisions: that a PM triggers on run hours because calendars lie, that an approval has to clear from a phone because the approver is never at a desk, that MRO spend is worthless as one bucket and useful at whatever level you can actually act on.

It is also why this is sized and priced for a shop your size, rather than being an enterprise system with the expensive parts switched off.

Start where it hurts

Purchasing and maintenance are the two most shops turn on first, and usually together — they are where small plants leak money quietly, and neither needs a single machine wired up before it does something useful.

• MRO purchasing

  Requisitions raised on the floor, approvals that route by value and category, and spend attributed at whatever level is honest for it — asset, cell, cost center or plain shop supply. What it does →

• Maintenance

  PMs that trigger on run hours rather than a calendar, with parts, manuals and history living on the asset — and a PM that raises its own requisition. What it does →

And the rest, when you want them

• Floor

  The execution layer. Where every job actually is, ahead or behind against a real standard, with process times measured rather than estimated.

• Quality

  In-process checks, first article, roving inspection, and SPC in the places where it earns its keep.

• Planning

  Finite-capacity sequencing: what runs next on which machine, including the work that goes outside and has to come back.

• People

  The training matrix — who is signed off on what, who is close, and who should be coached next. Capability, not league tables.

Each one is bought on its own and turned on when it has a job to do, not because a license bundle said so. Pick the modules that fit how your shop actually runs, add others as you need them, and you are never asked to pay ahead of what you are using.

It works with your ERP. Or without one.

This does not want to be your ERP and will not ask you to replace it. It reads what it needs and writes back what the office has to see. Where there is no ERP — and plenty of forty-person shops run on a quoting tool and a spreadsheet — it runs on its own.

The gap it is built to close is the one in between. The office knows what was ordered and what shipped. The floor knows what is really happening. The margin is made or lost in the three weeks between those two facts.

Built so the floor will use it

A system that is one percent harder than a sticky note loses to the sticky note. That is not a training problem, it is a design constraint, and it applies to everyone who touches the thing: the operator logging an operation with gloves on, the buyer working through a day of requisitions, the supervisor approving them between meetings.

Which is why there is no per-seat license to make you ration who gets an account, why approvals are one tap, and why the screens are readable at arm's length from a machine.

More on that here.

Who it is for

Discrete manufacturers of roughly twenty to a hundred and fifty people — machine shops, fabricators, contract manufacturers. Usually already running an ERP in the office, still running paper on the floor. If finding out where work order 18442 is right now means someone walks out to look for it, it is built for you.