Epicor, JobBoss, E2, Infor — the bill climbs while the fit gets worse. We build custom, owned software for mid-market fab shops, job shops, and machine shops across the Midwest.
Your renewal grew again. Estimating still lives in Excel because the quoting module wasn't built for how you actually price a job. Your floor runs on whiteboards, Post-its, and email.
Schedule attainment you can't trust. WIP visibility that's always a phone call away. A six-figure annual bill for software your team works around, not with.
OUR ANSWER
We build and run custom operational software for mid-market manufacturers: the systems your estimators, schedulers, quality managers, and floor supervisors actually live in every day. You own the code, the data, and the workflow.
A monthly retainer, sized to your business, puts an embedded team of developers, designers, and product strategists behind your roadmap. It runs roughly the all-in cost of hiring one senior developer in Cincinnati or Indianapolis — for the capacity of a full team.
You don't rip everything out on day one. You pick the highest-impact pain point, we build the replacement, and we integrate it with the systems you're keeping. Then the next one, and the next.
The spend doesn't change much. Where it goes does. Redirected, the same budget builds software you own outright: an asset on your balance sheet, and a workflow no competitor can buy off a shelf.
Five high-impact replacement targets where custom-owned software usually outperforms the SaaS incumbent.
Estimating is the most company-specific workflow in manufacturing — which is why it ends up as a sprawl of Excel, tribal knowledge, and a module nobody trusts. Custom quoting tools built on your historical job data and process sequences turn that institutional knowledge into a structural advantage.
A custom job tracking system built for your work centers, job types, and inspection holds gives leadership real-time WIP visibility and on-time performance — without forcing your floor into a workflow some vendor designed for a different shop.
The most expensive pain in mid-market manufacturing isn't any single broken tool — it's the duct tape between them. Custom middleware connecting your existing systems is consistently our fastest-payback engagement, and usually the wedge into everything else.
Digital travelers, inspection records, and compliance documentation build the clean data layer that makes AI applications possible. Sensor clusters for environmental monitoring, automated OSHA tracking, AI-assisted quality inspection — all of it starts with data that's structured enough to use.
Custom quality management tools built on your inspection workflows, CMM data, and NCR processes give you the traceability automotive and high-volume customers require — without the enterprise QMS price tag.
We're a Cincinnati-based engineering firm working with mid-market companies across the Ohio Valley: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Lexington. Our developers think in business outcomes, not just code. In manufacturing, that means understanding job costing, schedule attainment, customer-mix risk, and why your floor supervisor doesn't trust the system-generated capacity number.
A senior software engineer in the Midwest runs $120K–$180K in base salary. Add benefits, taxes, recruiting, and ramp time, and the all-in cost is well north of $200K in year one — for one person who can't replace your software stack alone.
Our retainer engagements start in that same range and put a full team behind your roadmap: senior engineers, a product strategist, designers, and a delivery lead. The output is software you own, replacing software you rent.
ERP license + maintenance (Epicor, JobBoss, E2) — $40K – $150K
Quoting & estimating tools — $10K – $40K
Scheduling & dispatch software — $12K – $35K
Quality / inspection / CMM software — $15K – $50K
Reporting & BI tools — $10K – $30K
OSHA / compliance tracking — $8K – $25K
Total recurring SaaS — $95K – $330K
You don't replace all of it. You replace the parts where custom fits your business better — which, in our experience, is most of it.
HOW WE START
Most engagements start with a Facility & Process Assessment: a focused 2 to 4 week engagement that maps your current stack, identifies the highest-impact replacement target, and produces a prototype, a realistic budget, and an honest answer about whether we're the right team. No code written, no long-term commitment, just a clear plan you can take to your partners or the board.
Tell us what your current stack looks like, what's working, and what isn't. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right team — and if we are, we'll have a plan before the first line of code.
