Replaced with custom MES Kanban + free software.

Kingsland Fabrications is a steel fabrication specialist in Warrington. Stephen Chappell, the MD, originally came to us for one thing: a website. They’d never had one — the business ran entirely on word of mouth and repeat work.

A discovery call changed the scope. The real pain wasn’t marketing — it was the shop floor. Jobs were tracked on a Kanban board and a patchwork of free software. Things went missing. Jobs got missed. Whenever the shop floor needed a status update, someone in admin had to walk over, ask, and key it in. A constant human bottleneck that got worse every time Kingsland took on more work.

June 2025 — Phase one: custom MES. We built Kingsland a bespoke Manufacturing Execution System to replace the Kanban-and-spreadsheets stack. Real-time job tracking, stage transitions, and status visibility from the office through to the fabrication bays. Admin stopped chasing; the shop floor started reporting.

January 2026 — Phase two: the website they originally asked for. With the back-office on firm ground, we built their first ever marketing site — a proper front door that now brings in organic enquiries they’d never have seen otherwise.

Since then — phase three, and still running. The MES keeps growing. AI features get layered in as we spot manual drudgery that shouldn’t exist. The paint-note automation (Mistral’s OCR model reading PDF cut lists and auto-generating paint instructions) took up to two hours a day off the shop-floor supervisor — time he now spends fabricating and quality-checking. Alongside that: invoice matching, drawing extraction, photo-based QC inspection, a conversational AI assistant for the shop floor, workflow automation, and live production analytics.

That’s the shape of how we work with the clients we fit best with. One discovery call turned a website enquiry into a multi-year partnership that now runs the whole operation. We stay in, we keep finding the next bottleneck, and we keep building.