Half our revenue comes from one plant. Should we be spending on software at all?
That concentration is an argument for it, not against. The businesses that come through an idle period best are the ones that can already see every open quote, every customer they have not spoken to in six months, and every invoice outstanding. We would scope a first build around exactly that visibility, at a fixed price, so it is not another fixed cost you regret in a slow quarter.
Do you build anything that runs on the mill floor?
No. Machine controls, PLCs and anything sitting on operational technology are outside what we do and we say so up front. We work on the office and yard side — quoting, purchase orders, certificates, scheduling, invoicing. If your problem is genuinely on the equipment, we will tell you to go and find the right people for it.
A customer audits our traceability. Would this survive that?
That is the design brief. Certificates get filed against the heat, the purchase order and the job when they arrive, versions are kept rather than replaced, and every approval has a name and a timestamp on it. The point is that the pack you hand over is assembled from records made at the time, not reconstructed the week the auditor books a date.
Our estimator has thirty years in his head. Does this replace him?
No, and anything claiming to would be selling you something. What it does is stop him retyping. He sees the material cost, the last three times you ran the part, and what it really took, then he sets the price. The machine handles reading the drawing and finding the history. The judgement stays where it is.
What happens to the information if we part ways?
You keep all of it. Quotes, job history, certificates, customer records and documents come out in standard formats on request, and the accounts sit in your company name from the beginning. We put that in the agreement before you pay anything, because a shop that has been here through three owners of the mill has a right to be suspicious.
Is AI really needed here, or is that the sales pitch?
It is needed for a narrow slice: reading dates off a certification card, pulling a heat number off a scanned mill report, sorting a night's worth of messages into urgent and not. Everything else — pricing, scheduling, invoicing — is ordinary software and cheaper. If we quote you AI for something arithmetic would do, push back and we will drop it.
How long before we would see anything working?
Four to eight weeks for a first build is normal, and we map the process before writing code so the scope is fixed and you know what you are getting. The mapping session happens in your shop — Constitution Drive, South Adams Street, wherever you actually work — because a yard tells us more in an hour than a call does in three. If the mill schedule means you have a narrow window, tell us and we will aim the delivery at it rather than promising everything and landing late.
Do you work under an NDA?
Yes, routinely. A lot of what we would see here is customer pricing, drawings and supplier terms, which is exactly the material a competitor would want. We are a US-based team, we sign before we look at anything, and we do not reuse a client's material anywhere else.