Case Study: How a Fabrication Shop Stopped Losing Money on Every Job

Contents

• The Shop
• The Leak: Busy, Respected, Quietly Bleeding
• Where the Money Was Actually Going
• What We Built
• The Results After Four Months
• Why a Box Off the Shelf Would Not Have Fixed It
• FAQ
• How OpsMavix Can Help

The Shop {#the-shop}

Twenty-four people. Laser cutting, plasma for the heavy plate, press-brake bending, weld cells, and a mix of structural steel and architectural work: staircases, handrails, balconies, the bespoke one-off jobs where a fast, accurate quote wins the work. Fifteen years established, full order book, a good name locally.

Everything ran on one paper route card per job. A job number was written on a traveller, the traveller followed the parts around the floor, and the owner carried the schedule in his head and on a whiteboard. It had worked for years. It was also, by the time we met them, the single thing holding the business back.

The Leak: Busy, Respected, Quietly Bleeding {#the-leak}

The owner’s own words, roughly: “We’re flat out, but I couldn’t tell you which jobs actually made us money until the accounts come back, and by then it’s a month gone.”

That is the leak in one sentence. The symptoms were the ones every fab shop knows:

• “Where’s job 4471?” and three people go and look in three different places. The route card was under someone’s coffee cup or it had walked off to the brake with the parts.
• The laser flat out, the welders stood about. The machine reports looked great. The weld cell logged “waiting on parts.” The parts existed, nobody had sorted the nest into kits.
• Quotes from the gut. Material weight plus a feel for the hours. Setup and changeover time, the most underestimated number in the shop, was barely counted.
• The Friday reckoning. “We didn’t make money on that one” arrived weeks after the job shipped, if it arrived at all.
• Made perfectly, to the wrong rev, straight in the skip. A superseded drawing reached the floor and a good part got scrapped.

None of this was incompetence. It was a twenty-four-person operation running on a system built for six, and the paper simply could not keep up with jobs that split into sub-parts, ran different routes at once, and reunited at the weld cell.

Where the Money Was Actually Going {#where-the-money-went}

Before building anything, we spent time on the floor and in the numbers. The leak was not one big hole. It was several small ones nobody could see:

• Under-quoted setup time. When we logged actual hours against a sample of jobs, roughly one in nine ran materially over the quoted hours, almost always on setup and changeover on low-quantity, high-variety work. Nobody knew, because estimated versus actual was never compared.
• Scrap from superseded drawings. Wrong-rev parts hitting the floor were costing the shop somewhere around a couple of thousand pounds a month in wasted material and machine time.
• Chasing, not making. The owner and two senior people spent a real slice of every day answering “where is it?” and hunting for parts and paper. That is skilled time not spent making or quoting.
• Slow quotes losing work. Quotes took two to three days because the information to price them was scattered. In bespoke fab, the fast accurate quote wins the job. Slow quotes lost some outright.

Add those up and the shop was giving away roughly forty thousand pounds a year, before you even count the work it never won because a quote came too late.

What We Built {#what-we-built}

Not an ERP the shop would spend two years fighting. One right-sized, owned operations system that did the specific jobs this shop needed, and nothing it did not:

• One live job board. Every works order, every operation, every part, on one screen. The whiteboard and the paper route card were retired. “Where’s 4471?” became a two-second look.
• Shop-floor kiosks, not phones. Mobiles were banned on the floor, so the floor logs on touchscreen kiosks at each work centre. Foremen and managers get access on their own devices. Each operation is booked on and off as it runs.
• Per-operation time logging. Every hour lands against the job and the operation that consumed it, automatically building estimated-versus-actual on every job.
• Job costing that closes the loop. The moment a job ships, the owner sees what it actually cost against what it was quoted. No more month-late reckoning.
• Drawing and revision control. The current rev is attached to the operation and viewable at the kiosk. A superseded drawing cannot reach the floor as the live one.
• Material and consumable traceability. For structural work, heat numbers and welding-consumable records follow the job, which the shop needed to win bigger, compliance-heavy contracts.

We tailored it to the shop’s real flow, kept its own accounting ledger in place and fed it rather than replacing it, and migrated the open jobs so nobody had to hand-load a backlog.

The Results After Four Months {#the-results}

Representative figures, measured against the shop’s own before-baseline:

• On-time dispatch: about 68 percent to around 91 percent. Slips got spotted in real time instead of at four o’clock on loading day.
• Quote turnaround: two to three days down to same-day. The information to price a job was finally in one place. Win rate on fast-turnaround enquiries went up with it.
• Scrap from wrong-rev parts: close to zero. Revision control took that leak off the table almost entirely.
• Around forty thousand pounds a year in recovered margin. Mostly previously invisible setup and labour time that was being quoted away, now visible and priced.
• Skilled time handed back. The daily “where is it?” hunt largely disappeared, giving the owner and his seniors their days back for quoting and making.

The system paid for itself in roughly five months on the recovered margin alone, before counting the extra work won on faster quotes or the bigger contracts opened up by proper traceability.

Why a Box Off the Shelf Would Not Have Fixed It {#why-not-a-box}

The shop had already looked at the generic tools. Two problems killed them.

First, the fit. A general project or job tool can show you a task board. It cannot follow a welding-consumable serial number through a job for EN 1090 compliance, or handle one job splitting into sub-parts on different routes and reuniting at the weld cell. That is fabrication-specific, and generic software either cannot do it or makes you bend your shop to fit its shape.

Second, ownership. A rented tool is a bill that grows with every seat, forever, and the shop never owns the thing its whole floor now runs on. This shop wanted a system it owned once, built around how it actually works, that it could extend as it grew. That is what we build.

FAQ {#faq}

How long did the build take? Around six weeks to a working system, then tuning on the floor. The shop was live and comfortable on it before its next busy season.

Did the floor actually use it? Yes, because it was built for the floor: kiosks at the work centres, booking on and off in seconds, no phones required. When logging a job takes less time than hunting a paper card, people use it.

Are these numbers guaranteed? No. They are representative of what this shop achieved, and every operation is different. The honest promise is delivery of the system we scope, not a specific financial result. What we can say is that when a shop cannot see its own margin, there is almost always margin to find.

Do you replace our accounting software? No. We keep your ledger and feed it. Your operations system and your accounts talk to each other; neither has to become the other.

How OpsMavix Can Help {#how-opsmavix-can-help}

If your shop is busy, respected, and you still cannot say which jobs made money until the accounts come back, that is the exact leak we fix. We start with a free Operations Leak Audit: a hard look at where your jobs, hours and margin are actually going, and whether a right-sized owned system would pay for itself.

Book a free Operations Leak Audit and we will tell you honestly what is leaking and what it is worth to fix.