Guides / Local
A manufacturing software developer based in Montcalm County, about an hour from Grand Rapids — close enough to drive to your floor and walk it with you. Built by someone who owned and ran a machine shop for a decade, not a vendor reading off a brochure.
If you run a manufacturing shop anywhere in West Michigan — Grand Rapids, Holland, Zeeland, Muskegon, Kalamazoo, or up here around Greenville and Belding — and you're looking for custom software that actually fits how your shop works, that's what this is. Linked Operations builds software that fills the gaps between the systems you already run: the handoffs, the manual workarounds, the work nobody designed a system for.
Not another ERP. Not a per-seat subscription you'll resent in two years. Custom software for manufacturers, sized to the one or two things that are genuinely costing you hours every week, deployed inside the Microsoft 365 or Google tenant you already pay for.
I'm Jason. Before I wrote software for manufacturers, I spent more than twenty years in manufacturing, including a decade owning and operating a machine shop. I've quoted the job, chased the vendor PO acknowledgment that never came back, found out two weeks after a part shipped that it lost money, and watched a good machinist's job knowledge walk out the door at retirement. I know what a traveler is, what a quote-to-PO mismatch costs you, and why month-end close always lands later than it should.
That matters because most software people don't speak your language. They'll sell you a platform and leave you to bend your shop around it. I'd rather sit at the table, ask how the work really moves through your building, and build the small thing that takes the pain out — the part nobody else thought was worth solving because it wasn't a product, it was just your shop.
I'm in Sheridan, in Montcalm County — out past Belding and Greenville, roughly an hour from the Grand Rapids area. That's the real local edge: I'm drivable. The first call is free and runs about thirty minutes, mostly questions, and for shops across West Michigan an in-person visit is easy to set up. I'd rather see the floor than guess at it from a screen share.
West Michigan is one of the densest manufacturing regions in the country — office furniture, automotive supply, plastics and injection molding, food and beverage, medical device, metal fabrication and machining, packaging. From the Grand Rapids and Wyoming corridor out to the lakeshore in Holland, Zeeland and Muskegon, down to Kalamazoo, and up through Greenville, Belding and the rest of Montcalm County, the shops are here. Being able to show up in person, in a reasonable drive, is worth more than most people give it credit for.
The work falls into four lines, and the honest answer to "what would you build for us" is: it depends on where your hours and your errors actually go. A few things already running in production for a mid-size West Michigan machine shop give the flavor:
Yours probably won't be exactly these. It'll be whatever the gap is in your building. The point is that every one of them is real, deployed, and in daily use — and the same approach gets configured for the next shop with a similar process.
Everything above is running in production for a manufacturer right now — vendor PO watchers, order-entry automation, daily operating briefings, quoting engines, tribal-knowledge capture. The Work page lays out each one: what it does, and the early results from the real deployment.
See the selected work →There's no enterprise sales cycle and no six-month implementation. The engagement is short and the path is the same every time:
No. The deepest experience is in machining, but the approach fits any manufacturer with the same kind of gaps — plastics, furniture, food and beverage, packaging, automotive supply, medical device. If work falls through the cracks between your systems, it's probably worth a conversation.
Not necessarily. Plenty of solid shops run on QuickBooks and a stack of spreadsheets, and that's often exactly where a small, right-sized automation pays off first. The guides get into where to start, including when your shop system can't tell you what you need to know.
Yes. That's the whole point of being based here. For shops across West Michigan, an in-person first visit is easy, and I'd rather walk your floor than work from a slide deck.
First call is free and runs about thirty minutes — mostly questions about how your operation really runs. If you're in West Michigan, an in-person visit is easy to set up. No demo, because there's nothing to demo; it's custom work.