A note on names: most of this work was built for one mid-size machine shop, and I keep my clients anonymous unless they tell me 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.
  • Took the routine line-by-line matching off the buyer's plate.

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.
  • Took the re-keying and routine quote check off the operator's plate.
  • Catches old or mismatched pricing before it becomes unprofitable repeat work.
02 Workflow Automation The repeatable work.

ERP & accounting connectors, the foundation

This is the keystone the rest of the work is built on. Standalone connectors into the systems this shop already runs, its ERP (JobBOSS) and accounting (QuickBooks Online), so every other tool can read and write to them directly. Connecting to what they already have is what makes the rest possible: the watching, the automating, the daily numbers. Nothing gets re-keyed by hand between systems.

  • The foundation every briefing, quoting, and automation tool builds on.
  • Less manual data entry across systems.

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 inside their own Microsoft 365, on tools they already pay for.

Drawings to inspection paperwork

Machinists were reading dimensions off prints by hand, converting them with a calculator, and re-typing all of it into an inspection sheet. Then the same job came back around and they did it again. So I built the thing that does it for them. It reads every dimension and tolerance off the drawing, balloons them, converts metric over to inch, and fills out the inspection forms. It gets installed and set up on the drawings and forms an operation already uses.

  • Reading, ballooning, converting and typing all happen in one pass.
  • No hand-written dimensions on prints.
  • They asked to keep it.
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 One-Off 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's free. About 30 minutes, a straight conversation about how your operation runs and where it's leaking, not a demo. If there's something worth building, I'll say so; if there isn't, I'll say that too.

Email Jason [email protected]