Know What's on the Shop Floor — Without Walking the Shop Floor.
Fabrication margin is built one job at a time and lost ten ways at once. Slippage on schedules, drift on labour hours, hidden material variance, late deliveries that ripple through. Live operational analytics put the real numbers in front of you when decisions can still be made.
The promise
Where it hurts
The fabricators reality.
You see margin slipped at month-end. By then, the cause is buried under 100 jobs. Was it material costs? A bad customer mix? Labour drift on a few big jobs? You need a person to spend two days digging through three systems, by which point next month's margin is already happening. The decisions that matter happen Tuesday afternoon, not Friday morning.
What we actually build
Tuned for fabricators.
Single source of truth
Data from MES, accounts, supplier portals into one warehouse. Reconciled, defined consistently, refreshed in real or near-real time.
Dashboards designed around real decisions
What's shipping today. Which jobs are at risk. Which customers are slipping in spend. Where capacity is bottlenecked. Designed around the role — office manager sees scheduling; commercial director sees margin; production manager sees throughput.
Ask in plain English
For everything not on a dashboard: a natural-language query interface. "What did we ship to Acme last quarter?" "Which jobs ran more than 20% over estimate?" Answers in seconds.
Alerts on what matters
Margin trending below target. A customer who hasn't reordered. A job 3 days late with no flag raised. The system pings the right person before it becomes a fire.
Real engagement
The outcome.
Live operational analytics across the production workflow — jobs in progress, scheduling, supplier status, customer commitments. Office and shop-floor visibility in one consistent view.
Typical stack
We integrate with what you have.
- Custom MES
- Sage
- BigQuery / Postgres
- Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace
- Supplier portals
If your stack isn't listed, ask — almost always we can integrate. We've connected to bespoke MES, ancient on-prem systems, and email-only interfaces.
Pricing
Fixed fee, phased delivery.
£4,800–£15,000 for build, ~£200–£500/month for hosting + maintenance
From £4,800
Operational analytics for fabricators
- Workflow audit + industry-specific spec
- Build, integrations, and tuning to your real data
- Live deployment in your environment
- Ongoing tuning + accuracy monitoring
Questions
Things people in this industry ask us.
01 How is this different from Power BI?
Power BI is for analysts to build reports. We build for operators — dashboards designed around real decisions, plus an AI layer that answers questions you didn't pre-build. You can host the data in anything; the difference is the layer in front of your team.
02 How real-time is "real-time"?
Depends on the source. For modern systems with APIs, genuinely real-time. For Sage and older systems, typically every 5-15 minutes. We design around the data you have.
03 Can the shop floor see this too?
Yes. A simplified shop-floor view shows what they need: what's next, what's late, who's where. Pairs naturally with the internal AI assistant for natural-language queries.
04 What if our reporting needs change?
Dashboards are designed to be modified. We hand over with documentation. The AI layer adapts to new questions as long as the data is there — no rebuild required for new ad-hoc queries.
05 How much for ongoing hosting?
Typically £200-£500/month at SMB data volumes, covering the data warehouse, the dashboards, and the AI layer's model usage.
The pattern
See operational analytics for other industries.
Operational analytics
You shouldn't have to walk the shop floor at 11am to find out which jobs are running late.
Let's see if we can help.
A 15-minute chat with Chris & Kay. No slides. No pitch deck. You tell us what's on your plate; we follow up by email with real thinking.