Each shop in the group quotes alone, from its own past jobs
How do we quote faster across the machine shops we have bought, when each one keeps its own job history?
Figures and rules on this page apply to
Europe
Working somewhere else? The shape of the problem usually travels. The deadlines do not.
What this looks like
A customer emails a drawing for a welded bracket. One shop's estimator prices it from scratch over two days. Another shop in the same group made almost the same part last spring. Nobody knew, because each shop's job history lives in its own system.
The numbers
Every figure here is someone else’s. Check them.
- 3.7mpeople employed by EU makers of fabricated metal products in 2023, the second-largest manufacturing employer
- 2.2mmanufacturing enterprises in the EU in 2023, most of them small
Why it happens
It is not a people problem.
Every shop records its jobs correctly, in its own words. One calls it an article, another a drawing number, another a customer part. Materials, routings and hours are logged in different ways. So a past job that would answer today's quote is invisible from the shop next door.
Why your current software has not fixed it
Because it was never built to.
The usual fix is one ERP for the whole group. That takes years, and the owners of each shop chose to keep their own way of working. Meanwhile the next shop joins with a third system. Quoting stays local because the records are local.
Intelligence, plumbed in
A scanned drawing and a customer's email can be matched to a similar part made years ago at another site.
We build a layer that reads every shop's job history. Each new drawing then starts from the closest job the group has made. Underneath it: a connector, one agreed meaning per field, and a test set scored on your own records.
How we make AI survive real data-
Connectors -
A semantic layer -
Evals you can check
However hard, whatever it is
Machine and sheet-metal shops are one example. Bring the quote that takes longest.
We wrote this about groups of job shops because each purchase adds records nobody else can read. The same gap exists in any group that grows by buying similar firms.
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01 We sit with you
Days where the work happens, not a workshop in a meeting room. We watch the job get done and write down the shortcuts nobody wrote down.
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02 We read everything
Your data, your rules, your vendors and their documentation, and the published research on your sector. We report what is actually in there.
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03 We break it to first principles
Not which tool fixes this. What is actually causing it, taken apart until we reach the piece that cannot be divided further.
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04 Then we build
Weeks, not quarters. By this point we are not guessing what to build, and guessing is the thing that makes projects long.
What we build
Specific enough to argue with.
Four mechanisms, not four features. Each one is a thing that happens on its own, every day, whether or not anyone remembers to run it.
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Customer drawings and quote requests read on arrival, whatever format the customer used.
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Similar past jobs found across every shop in the group, with real hours and material used.
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A draft quote for the best-placed shop, for its estimator to check and send.
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One view for group management of open quotes, win rates and spare capacity by shop.
How you would know it worked
Numbers in your own reporting, not ours.
- Hours from a customer drawing arriving to a quote being sent.
- Share of quotes that start from a matched past job instead of a blank sheet.
- Number of jobs placed with a sister shop instead of turned down.
Straight answers
Where a model is involved, it is scored against your own records first. Accuracy per source, not one flattering average.
The questions this raises
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Each of our companies runs its own business.
They still do. The layer reads each shop's records and changes none of them. Each shop decides whether to use the draft.
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Our estimators know things no system does.
That is why they check every draft. The layer removes the searching and re-typing, not the judgement.
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How soon would we see a difference?
Usually within weeks, starting with the shops that receive the most drawings. Each newly bought shop can be connected the same way.
Where the figures come from
We did not make these up, and you should not take our word for them.
Also in manufacturing
Productivity fell in fourteen of the twenty manufacturing groups measured
Federal figures show labour productivity declining across most manufacturing industry groups. Machine data is abundant. The work between machines is not recorded at all.
ProblemEvery plant you add keeps its own production record
Contract device makers grow by buying plants. Each one arrives with its own travellers, lot numbering and record format, and the auditor still expects one traceable story.
ProblemEvery hotel project arrives as a different drawing set
Contract furniture makers win hotel and retail projects on bespoke work. Each brief arrives as someone else's drawings, schedules and specs, and quoting waits for a person to read them all.
ProblemEvery line you built is one of a kind, and its history is in service notes
Makers of packing and sorting lines build each one to order, then service it for years. The real record of each line sits in service reports and engineers' notes.
ProblemThe shop you just bought can make parts your estimators never quote
Precision machining groups grow by buying shops. Each shop arrives with its own machines, job history and quoting habits, and requests still land wherever the customer first sent them.
ProblemOne heat network, two pipe ranges, and every bid costed by hand
Pipe makers now sell complete heat-network systems. Each bid still means reading someone else's network plans and costing every run by hand, often in two separate catalogues.
The meaning is not in any schema
Two systems agree on the field and disagree on what it means.
The rule lives in a document, or in what one site has always called something, or in a habit nobody wrote down. Joining the data is the easy half; agreeing what it means is the half that is actually the work.
- Behavioral healthOne in four facilities still run on paper, and there is a reason
- Accounting & consultingAn eight-hundred-billion-dollar quarter built on hours recalled from memory
- Senior livingNobody wants a sixth dashboard
- Skilled nursingEvery building reports. Nobody can see the portfolio.
- Supply chainThe distributor you just bought still takes orders its own way
Consent rules, site vocabulary, what an hour counts as. Wherever two systems agree on a field and not on what it means.Describe the disagreement.
The group already knows the price. It just cannot find it.
We build a layer that reads every shop's job history. Each new drawing then starts from the closest job the group has made.
See everything we build-
Software -
Hardware -
Ways of working -
Whole ventures
Is this happening to you? Tell us the size of it.
Twenty minutes. We will tell you honestly whether the numbers justify doing anything about it.