Our biggest customers audit their suppliers. Will something you build survive that?
It is designed for it, because the audit is the reason to build. Every record carries a timestamp and a name, superseded versions are kept rather than overwritten, and you can pull a date range without ringing us. What we will not do is claim to certify anything ourselves. We build the trail; your quality people stand behind it, and we would rather say that plainly than let an auditor discover it.
We are a two-truck contractor. Does a system this involved make sense at our size?
Usually a much smaller version of it does. For a two-truck outfit the thing that actually pays is the card tracking and the job write-up, not a full platform. We would scope that and nothing else, quote it as one number, and tell you to spend the rest on a second truck. Selling you more than the problem is worth is how firms like ours get a bad name in a town this size.
Half our rental houses fill up because of the college. What happens the year enrollment dips?
Then you want a system that is not built on the assumption of a full house. What we put in is the boring durable part — properties, tenancies, maintenance history, deposits and who approved what. That is worth having whether the houses are let to students, to plant workers on a contract, or to families. We deliberately avoid building anything that only works while the campus is at capacity.
How do you price a first build when our own quoting is all custom work?
The same way you would price a one-off fabrication: we work the job out before we put a number on it. That means a mapping stage spent alongside whoever actually does the job, sketching what genuinely happens rather than what the procedure says, then a written scope with a fixed figure and an explicit list of what sits outside it. If something new appears halfway through, it becomes a second phase with its own price rather than a quiet extension of the first.
If we walked away in a year, what would we be walking away with?
All of it. Orders, certificates, tenancy records, job histories — yours, in ordinary file formats, on request and without an argument. We put the export clause in before you sign anything, because a supplier here would never accept a customer holding their quality records hostage and neither should you.
Which bits of this are genuinely AI, and which are just software?
Reading a scanned mill cert, pulling dates off a photographed card, and sorting a pile of enquiries are AI doing what it is actually good at. Deciding whether a lot passes, whether a worker is cleared, or whether a tenant gets charged is not — those stay with your people, deliberately. Plenty of what we install here is an ordinary database and a good form, and when that is the honest answer we say so and the invoice is smaller.
The plants run around the clock. Does that change how you deliver?
It changes the go-live, mostly. We do not switch a system over during a run that matters, and we do not train a crew on a shift where they are already short. We plan the changeover for a quiet window, keep the old way available alongside for a fortnight, and make sure at least one person on each shift has been through it before anyone depends on it.
Do you need to be in Crawfordsville to do this work properly?
We need to be in your building for the mapping, which is a drive from central Indiana rather than a trip. The rest works fine remotely. What matters more than proximity is that we show up with a diagram of your process and let you tear it apart, so the first meeting is a correction rather than a lecture. We sign an NDA before that meeting if you want one.