Our customers compete against each other. How do you keep one team's drawings away from another's?
By building it that way from the start, not by adding permissions later. Each customer's drawings, part numbers and job history sit in their own space with access granted per person and every open logged. Your estimator sees what they need for the job in front of them and nothing else. We sign your confidentiality agreement before we look at a single drawing, and if you have not got one drafted we will bring ours to the first meeting.
Does anything here get sent to a public AI service?
Not without you saying so in writing, and for shops holding customer designs the default answer we recommend is no. Document reading can run on infrastructure you control or on a service with no training rights over your content. It is a scoping decision we make with you at the start, in plain terms, rather than something buried in a settings page.
We are flat out from March to June and quiet after. When would you even build this?
Not in May, and we will not pretend otherwise. Realistically we map the process during your quiet stretch, build over the summer or autumn, and have it running well before qualifying. If you come to us in April, we will scope one small piece that helps this season and hold the rest until you can give it attention.
How do you price it when we cannot tell you what next season looks like?
Fixed price, agreed before anything is built, based on a written map of your process that you sign off. That map is the deliverable that protects you: it means the price does not move because the scope drifted. It also means you can decide to build half of it, which shops with a lumpy year often should.
If we stop working with you, what happens to years of job and part history?
It is yours and it leaves with you in an open format, complete, at no charge. Drawings, job records, material certificates, inspection results. The term is in the contract you sign, before any deposit. A shop's job history is the record of how it solved things, and holding that hostage would be both wrong and, in a town where every shop knows every other shop, commercially suicidal.
We run an accounting package and a spreadsheet that works. Are you going to make us throw those out?
The spreadsheet, maybe, if it is the thing breaking. The accounting package, almost certainly not. We connect to what is already in place and build the missing middle, which in most shops here is the link between a quote, a drawing revision and a promised date. Replacing working software is a good way to spend money and gain nothing.
Would an AI ever decide a part is good?
No. Inspection judgment stays with your inspector, full stop. What the system does is make sure the right drawing is in front of them, the certificates are attached, and the result is recorded against the serial number. Anything going out to a customer is held until a named person releases it — that gate is called SolaceSentry and it is not optional in what we build.
We run a restaurant on Main Street, not a shop. Is any of this for us?
Yes, and the harder problem is yours. A shop knows its orders weeks out; you find out on the day. What helps is publishing honest availability and race-week rules early, splitting enquiries so a forty-cover corporate booking is not handled like a walk-in, and planning staff and stock from what each specific day actually did last year rather than the memory of it being chaos.