Special tools for teams
The software nobody will ever sell you.
Every operating team has three or four jobs that no vendor covers. Somebody checks the drawings by eye. Somebody rebuilds the same quote from scratch. Somebody retypes yesterday's numbers into this morning's report.
It is real work, it is expensive, and it never shows up on anyone's roadmap, because it is too specific to your company for a product to exist. So we build it. One job at a time, until it is done and running.
Same engineering firm, same attitude, applied to software instead of steel. Who we are →
Find the work
One to two days, on site
We spend a day or two inside your operation. We watch the actual work, talk to the people doing it, and map where the time goes. Not a survey. Not a workshop. We stand where the work happens.
You get a ranked list of the three to five jobs where a purpose-built tool would pay for itself. Each one comes with an honest estimate, including a straight answer on the ones that are not worth building.
What you get
- ◆A written map of where the hours go
- ◆Three to five jobs, ranked by what they are costing you
- ◆A real estimate on each, including the ones we would not build
You keep the map whether or not we build anything.
Build the tool
Four to eight weeks, fixed scope, fixed price
We pick one job and build the tool that does it. You know the scope and the number before anything starts. It ships into the hands of the people who do the work. We stay until they are using it.
One job, done properly, beats five half-finished ones. If the first tool works, we talk about the second.
What you get
- ◆A working tool, in production, with your people trained on it
- ◆The source code and the documentation, yours to keep
- ◆Someone on your team who can run and change it without us
If a spreadsheet would solve it, we will tell you to use the spreadsheet.
Keep it running
Monthly, ongoing
Work changes and tools decay. Standards get revised, a customer changes a format, somebody adds a step. On retainer we keep yours current, extend it as you find the next job, and stay reachable when something breaks.
What you get
- ◆Maintenance and fixes on the tools we built
- ◆Extensions as your process changes
- ◆A standing hour when you want to think out loud about the next one
Month to month. Stop whenever it stops earning.
The kind of thing we build.
Not a product menu. These are the jobs that keep coming up when you stand in an operation and watch. Yours will be some version of one of them, or something nobody has seen yet.
Check the work before it leaves the building
Drawings, orders, specs, and packets reviewed against your standards, both the ones written down and the ones that only live in your senior person's head.
Turn a request into a quote
A model, an RFQ, or an email becomes a first-pass estimate your people can trust and correct, instead of a blank page every time.
Read the mess
PDFs, scans, emails, handwriting, and twelve years of folders. Pulled into something searchable and answerable without shipping your files anywhere.
Write the report somebody types every morning
The production summary, the shift handoff, the customer update. Drafted from your own systems, ready for a person to check and send.
Answer questions about your own documents
Your standards, your history, your past jobs. Ask in plain language and get an answer with a citation, not a guess.
Watch for the thing that keeps costing you
The late part, the missed revision, the job that always goes over. Caught while there is still time to do something about it.
How we do business.
Your data stays yours
If your work cannot leave the building, it does not leave the building. We will build it to run where it needs to run.
Fixed scope, fixed price
You know the number before we start. If the scope changes, we talk about it before anything is billed.
You get the source
Every tool we build for you is yours, with the code and the documentation. No seat licenses, no lock-in.
One working thing first
We will build one tool that works before we promise you a roadmap of five.
We will talk you out of it
If the answer is a spreadsheet, a phone call, or hiring one person, that is what you will hear. It costs us a project and saves you a year.
Plain language
Nine years of teaching engineering taught me one thing above all: you will understand what we built and why, or we have not finished explaining it.
Tell us what your people are doing by hand.
One paragraph is enough. If it is something we can help with, you will hear how. If it is not, you will hear that too.
Discuss a project