Machining and sheet metal: your shop runs, your office is drowning

You answer enquiries all day, you chase parts at five subcontractors, and you produce inspection reports by hand.

Thirty minutes, no commitment

Describe your workshop. I'll tell you where I would start and what I would leave alone.

Belgian precision subcontracting works in small and medium batches, for OEMs demanding on lead time, price and evidence. The machines are often recent and well run. The bottleneck is not in the shop: it is the four or five people in the office absorbing everything else.

What I see repeatedly in these shops is an imbalance: several hundred thousand euros invested in machines, and nothing at all invested in the information flow that decides their load.

What I see in your workshops

Enquiries arrive faster than they can be answered

Ten to thirty a week, each with drawings to open, material to price and time to estimate. One person can do it properly. Enquiries pile up, the most complex go last, and the OEM has already awarded the job when the answer goes out.

Parts tour the province before coming back

Heat treatment in one province, grinding at a partner, plating somewhere else, sometimes two round trips for the same part. Every transfer is a point where tracking is lost, and the final delivery date depends on the least reliable link in the chain.

The inspection report is redone for every customer

One customer wants their own template, another insists on the CMM report as an attachment, a third wants the material certificate with the heat number. The inspector retypes the same dimensions into three different layouts.

Setup time is not in the price

On batches of twenty to a hundred parts, setup weighs as much as cutting. It is estimated by feel in the quote, rarely measured, never compared with actuals. The part families you lose money on are almost always the ones where the setup-to-batch ratio has drifted.

Offcuts and remnants live in one person’s head

The storekeeper knows there is a piece of 80 mm bar that would do. That knowledge is written down nowhere, so more material gets ordered, and the remnant goes in the skip eighteen months later.

Where I would start, in this order

The order matters more than the list. Here it is as I would propose it after the audit, unless the two days on site show otherwise.

1
Your quotes depend on one person and go out too late
This is the first project in nine shops out of ten. Cutting your response time from eight days to two, and finally knowing your win rate per customer, changes the shop's load faster than any process improvement.
automate estimating and quote generation
2
You don't know exactly what has gone out to subcontractors
The shortest and most visible project. When outside operations are your leading cause of lateness, knowing in three seconds what is out and what is overdue is worth more than a complete dashboard.
track subcontracted parts without a shared spreadsheet
3
Your inspection reports are retyped by hand, part by part
Your OEMs impose different report formats on you. One template per customer, held in a single place, fed by one entry at the surface plate: that is inspector time given back to inspection.
automate inspection reports and non-conformances
4
Your production schedule is a spreadsheet rebuilt every Monday
Useful, but rarely first. It becomes a priority the day you consider buying a machine: better to measure the real load before signing a five-year lease.
move from a spreadsheet schedule to reliable machine load

What I don't do

What I do not do in a workshop:

I do not do CAM programming and I do not touch your post-processors.
I do not optimise your cutting nest: that is your nesting software's job, and it does it better than anything I could write.
I do not choose your cutting conditions or your tooling. That is your trade and I have no reason to substitute myself for it.
I do not sell per-machine subscription shop-floor monitoring. You pay for a project, you own the result.

The questions I get asked

Where do we start if we only have one budget?

With estimating if your order book is quiet and you want to bring work in; with subcontracting tracking if your book is full and you are delivering late. Those are opposite situations and getting the order wrong costs a quarter.

We already have a production system and only half of it is used.

That is the most common situation. Before building anything, I look at why the modules you paid for are not used: almost always because they demand data entry the shop cannot sustain. Recommissioning what exists often costs less than adding a tool, and I will say so even when it shrinks my scope.

What does it cost and how long does it take?

Two-day audit at €1,500, with a map of the time lost and a costed plan. Fixed-price projects between €8,000 and €15,000, delivered in three to four weeks.

Our operators do not like screens.

They do not like badly designed screens. A screen that replaces a greasy paper sheet and saves a walk to the office is adopted within days. The design is done at the machine, with them.

Who owns the code?

You do, with the documentation and the credentials. It is written into the quotation.

Let's talk for thirty minutes

You describe your flow, I tell you what can be automated, what cannot, and where I would start. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so during the call.