There is a Shelbyville in Illinois. Which one do you actually work in?
Both, and we keep them straight. The Illinois Shelbyville is a lake town at a Corps of Engineers dam; this one is a manufacturing and racing county seat on I-74 with Indianapolis half an hour up the road. The businesses have almost nothing in common, which is why we do not reuse a page or a proposal between them. If you ring us from Shelby County, Indiana, you get somebody who knows the difference.
We supply a casting line. Can you handle a document package without us retyping the print data?
That is the most common first build in this town. The print and the purchase order come in, the system reads the part number and revision off them, and every control plan, certificate and gauge record files itself against the revision it belongs to. Your quality lead still releases the package — we do not want a machine deciding a part conforms. What changes is that assembling it takes an afternoon instead of a fortnight, and you find out immediately when a customer sends a revision you have not been running.
Our staffing runs three shifts and the meet only runs April to October. When would you build anything?
Between November and March, if we can help it. The badge and rota work is worth having in place before the meet opens, and we would rather deliver something small and finished in February than something ambitious and half-tested in May. If you come to us in July we will scope the one piece that helps this season and hold the rest until the track goes quiet.
Does the system decide whether one of our people is cleared to work?
No, and we would refuse to build that. It reads a licence card, files the number and the expiry, and shows a supervisor who is short a document before the rota is posted. A named person on your side releases every shift list through the review gate we call SolaceSentry. Clearance is a regulator's call and a manager's call, never a piece of software's.
Our shop floor already runs on an ERP nobody likes. Are you going to tell us to replace it?
Almost certainly not. Ripping out a system that holds your orders and your inventory is expensive, slow, and usually solves a smaller problem than the one you called about. We connect to what is there and build only the missing piece — normally the document side, which most ERPs handle badly anyway. If the honest answer turns out to be that a configuration change in your existing tool fixes it, that is what we will tell you.
What happens to twenty years of tooling files and parcel records if we stop working with you?
They leave with you, in a plain exportable format, and we put that in the agreement before any money changes hands. For a tool shop the history of what ran on which die is most of what the business is worth, and for a title office the parcel chain is the whole asset. Neither should ever sit behind somebody else's login with a clause attached.
How much of this is genuinely AI, and how much is a database with a nice front end?
Reading a revision letter off a scanned print, pulling an expiry date off a licence card, and matching a legal description to a parcel are jobs where the technology genuinely does work a person would otherwise do by eye. Holding a rota and reminding you in March is a database with a nice front end, and we will price it that way. Anywhere ordinary software does the job better, we use ordinary software and charge you less for it.
We are a hotel and a restaurant, not a plant or a casino. Is any of this for us?
Yes, and the pattern is the same one: you sell a fixed amount of capacity into demand that spikes on race days and race weekends and goes flat in the winter. We build honest availability, block bookings held against a group rather than a name, and a forecast that treats a stakes weekend as its own thing instead of averaging it into a normal Saturday.