A note on names: most of this work was built for one mid-size machine shop, and we keep our clients anonymous unless they tell us otherwise. The shop, the systems, and the numbers are real. The systems are deliberately built so the same approach can be configured for the next manufacturer with a similar process.
01 Verification & Monitoring The watchers.

Vendor PO confirmation watcher

Every vendor PO is copied to a shared mailbox, which kicks off the watch. The system files the PO, then matches each vendor's acknowledgment back to it line by line — price, quantity, due date, part number — and watches for gaps in the PO-number sequence in case a buyer forgot to send one. If everything matches, it stays quiet. The buyer gets one daily digest of only the exceptions.

  • Flagged a missed order in the first week.
  • Caught a PO sent without its attachment within two weeks.
  • Surfaced that PO numbers were being transposed often enough to create a paper-trail problem.
  • ~45% less buyer time per vendor PO.

Customer PO intake

Incoming customer POs are forwarded to a shared mailbox, which tells the system the order exists. It files everything, reads the PO against the recent quote and part history, and checks pricing, lead time, and terms before drafting the order in the ERP. The operator gets a ready-to-process order — or a flag on exactly what doesn't match what was quoted.

  • No customer orders missed during the monitoring period.
  • ~65% less hands-on time across the whole order-entry process.
  • Catches old or mismatched pricing before it becomes unprofitable repeat work.
02 Workflow Automation The repeatable work.

RFQ & quote auto-filing

A lightweight automation — built in Power Automate, inside the shop's own Microsoft 365 — that watches the inbox for new customer RFQs, creates the folder structure automatically, files the RFQ and its drawings, and saves the finished quote when it goes back to the customer. A couple of minutes per quote: small on its own, real over a year, and nothing ends up lost in someone's inbox.

  • No more RFQs, drawings, or quotes lost in records.
  • Runs in their tenant, on the systems they already pay for.

Drawing conversion & inspection sheets

Machinists were hand-converting metric dimensions to standard on prints and filling inspection sheets by hand. This loads the PDF, lets the user pick the dimensions to convert, balloons them, and generates the inspection form automatically. On a repeat job, the clean drawing is already done — no re-converting, no re-ballooning.

  • Clean, reusable drawings and fewer conversion errors.
  • No hand-written dimensions on prints.
  • The machinists asked to keep it.

ERP & accounting connectors

Standalone connectors to the shop's ERP (JobBOSS) and accounting (QuickBooks Online) that let the rest of the tools read and write to those systems directly. Quiet plumbing — it runs in the background so data isn't re-keyed by hand between systems.

  • The foundation the briefings and quoting tools build on.
  • Less manual data entry across systems.
03 Operating Intelligence Data, turned into decisions.

Owner's daily briefing

Pulls from the ERP and accounting connectors and emails the owner a morning brief of the numbers that actually matter to him — cash-flow forecast, backlog, sales month-to-date. No logging in, no running three reports and stitching them together.

  • The same brief, the same time, every morning.
  • He stops waiting until after month-end to know where things stand.

KPI monthly briefing

The team version: automatically pulls on-time delivery, quality, quoting, scrap, and sales performance, populates the spreadsheets, looks at the trend, and distributes the snapshot. The report-running and spreadsheet-filling that used to eat a chunk of someone's month just happens.

  • Hours a month back from running reports.
  • More of the team can see how the shop is actually doing.
04 Custom Builds The one-offs.

Quoting engine

RFQs land in a shared mailbox; the system extracts what it can from the request and the drawings — quantities, part numbers, descriptions, material, plating, heat treatment — and starts the quote. The estimator sets routing and costing, and before the quote can go out, the system checks that every line item actually has the costs it should. Built around what this shop quotes, not a generic template.

  • Faster quoting than the system it replaced.
  • Only the features this shop needs — and a lower lifetime cost than an enterprise quoting subscription.

Shop Brain

Scan a job traveler or type a part number to pull everything tied to it — drawings, setup sheets, tool lists — and to capture what's usually lost: notes (typed or by voice) on what went right, what went wrong, and how to run the part next time. It also compares quoted, programmed, and actual times by pulling from the ERP and Mastercam, so quoting gets a feedback loop from what the floor actually did.

  • Tribal knowledge captured instead of walking out the door.
  • Big time savings hunting for files.
  • Quick staff adoption — they were tired of re-figuring jobs they'd already run.

The thread through all of it: the software handles the routine and only asks for a person where judgment is actually needed. One daily digest instead of a stream of alerts. Nothing gets silently dropped — if the system can't make sense of something, it flags it rather than guessing.

None of these remove the human from the loop. They take the watching, the re-keying, and the report-running off your people's plates, and put their attention exactly where it pays off.

Contact

Have a gap that looks like one of these?

If something here rhymes with where your hours or your errors actually go, send a note. First call is free and runs about 30 minutes — mostly questions about how your operation really runs. We'll figure out together whether there's a fit.

Email Jason [email protected]