Founderwright for job shops & manufacturers
AI for job shops and contract manufacturers. Quote it right. Ship it on time.
We connect your ERP or shop management system, time clocks, purchasing, and books into one AI brain, then build the quoting, scheduling, and job cost tools your shop needs. Everything above the compliance line is built in-house, around your machines, your people, and your customers’ requirements.
Private-equity-grade tools. Without giving up equity. Built by an operationally minded CFO, not a software vendor.
- Machine shops
- Job shops
- Fabricators
- Contract manufacturers
- Sheet metal
- Welding
- Plastics & molding
- Assembly
Operator-CFO built
Not generic software. What a CFO would put in front of a job shop.
Founderwright is built by an operationally minded CFO. The numbers that grow a company organically are the same ones that make an acquisition work and hold up when you sell. Every build starts there: surfaced before you ask and ranked by dollar impact.
Jobs shipped
Quoted vs. actual hours and margin on every closed job
The next quote on that part starts from what it really cost.
Machine hours
Contribution per hour on your bottleneck machine
The constraint sets your capacity, so it should run the work that pays the most.
Open orders
Revenue at risk of shipping late, flagged days ahead
Expediting is cheap on Monday and expensive on Thursday.
The same numbers carry a job shop through every stage: recovery, growth, acquisitions, and exit prep.
The morning brief
Surfaced before you ask. Ranked by what it’s worth.
Agents watch every connected system overnight. By morning, the issues that matter most are ranked, assigned, and drafted.
Monday, 6:10 a.m. · What the owner sees before first shift starts
Ranked actions
From your own numbers, across every system- 1Two orders at risk of shipping lateTodayDue Thursday · outside plating not confirmed
- 2Five-axis loaded to 118% this weekThis weekThree jobs can move to the horizontal mill
- 3Job 4471 ran 38% over quoted hoursThis weekSecond-op setup ran long · requote before the reorder
- 4On-time delivery at 94% this monthOn trackScrap down to 1.8% · certs attached to every shipment
Illustrative data. Every build is designed around your company’s own systems and numbers.
Voice notes that take action
Or just say it.
Between jobs, on the drive, or walking the floor: record a thought and the platform drafts the tasks, schedule changes, and answers. Nothing happens until you approve it. How voice notes work.
“Put job 4471 behind the hot job on the five-axis, have quality pull the certs for Thursday’s shipment, and what’s on-time delivery this month?”
- RescheduleJob 4471 → after the hot job on the five-axis · planner notified
- New taskQuality: gather material certs for Thursday’s shipment · due Wednesday
- AnswerOn-time delivery this month: 94% · 2 orders at risk this week
Illustrative. Nothing changes until you approve it.
Sound familiar
The shop is full. The margin isn’t.
Quotes take too long
Requests for quote pile up behind one estimator. By the time a price goes out, the buyer has already placed the order with a shop that answered faster.
Nobody checks quoted against actual
The job shipped, so it must have made money. Meanwhile setup ran twice as long as quoted, and the same number goes on the reorder.
One machine sets the schedule
Everything waits on the same bottleneck. When it goes down or a hot job cuts the line, three other orders slip, and you hear about it from the customer.
Certs chase you at shipping
Material certs, inspection reports, and customer-specific paperwork get pulled together at the dock. A missing document holds the shipment, or the order ships without it.
What we’d build
What we’d build for a job shop.
Each module comes out of one conversation about how work moves through your shop. It’s built in-house by Founderwright, owned by you, and running on your real quotes, jobs, routings, and machines from the day it goes live.
Owner’s command center
Bookings, backlog, WIP, shop load, on-time delivery, and margin by customer on one screen, with the week’s late jobs and losing quotes pulled to the top and every number tied to the job.
Quote desk
Every request for quote tracked to award, with turnaround and hit rate by customer, and past actuals for similar parts pulled in so each new price starts from real history.
Quoted vs. actual
Setup, run time, material, and outside processing compared to the quote on every job, so margin by part and customer is known when the job closes, not at year end.
Bottleneck scheduling
Load on every machine and work center, with the constraint scheduled first and everything else sequenced around it. A hot job shows exactly what it pushes back, and by how much.
On-time delivery watch
Every open order checked against its promise date, material, and outside services, so jobs at risk are flagged days ahead, when expediting still helps.
Scrap and rework
Scrap, rework, and nonconformances logged by job, machine, and cause, with the cost of each tallied so the fixes worth the most rise to the top of the list.
Material cost tracker
Material prices on every purchase order compared to the price in the quote, with open quotes flagged when bar, plate, or resin costs move enough to change the answer.
Customer requirements, per job
Each customer’s requirements attached to their jobs, with required certs and inspection reports gathered from your quality system before the job reaches shipping.
The compliance line
We build above the line. We connect to everything else.
For manufacturers, the line sits under your books and inventory costing, quality and certification records, any controlled technical data from defense work, payroll, and tax filings. Quoting, scheduling, and the shop floor sit above it.
Above the line
Built custom, in-house by Founderwright, around how you run. Owned by you.
Below the line
The regulated systems you’re required to keep. We read from them, and where they offer a write API, approved work is written straight back in.
Keep any tool you like. We integrate with it. Most shops keep their ERP or shop management system, their CAD/CAM software, and their quality system. We build quoting, scheduling, and job cost tools that read from all of them. See the systems we connect.
The build
How we’d build it for a job shop.
Follow a part through the shop
We sit down with you and trace one job from the request for quote to the shipped order: how it’s estimated, routed, scheduled, inspected, and invoiced, which machine everything waits on, and what paperwork each customer expects.
Connect your shop system
Your ERP or shop management system is connected, and the first command center is live on your real quotes, jobs, routings, and shipments. There’s no migration, and nobody on the floor changes how they work.
Add time, material, and quality
Time clocks, purchasing, outside processing, your quality system, and the books join the same brain, so quoted versus actual, scrap cost, and on-time delivery all agree with each other.
Replace the whiteboard workarounds
Above the compliance line, we build the tools your shop has been patching together with whiteboards and spreadsheets: the quote log, the schedule board, the hot list. One at a time, and you keep what we build.
The numbers it runs on
Your definitions. Measured the same way everywhere.
Every metric is defined with you once, tied back to the source systems, and checked by agents before anyone makes a decision on it.
Questions
What owners ask us.
Do we have to replace our ERP or shop management system?
No. Keep any tool you like; we connect your shop system first and build around it. Your routings, inventory, and work orders can stay exactly where they are while we add quoting, scheduling, and quoted versus actual on top. If you later retire something above the compliance line, we replace it with software built for how your shop actually runs.
What stays below the compliance line for a manufacturer?
Your books of record and inventory costing, quality and certification records, payroll, and tax filings. If you do defense work, controlled technical data stays in the environment and under the controls you already have for it. We leave it where it is, and we don’t claim to make a shop compliant. We read from the other systems, and where one offers a write API, approved work is written back, each write approved by a person and logged.
Can it help us quote faster without underpricing?
Yes, by tying quotes to actuals. When a request comes in, the quote desk pulls similar parts you’ve made, what they really took in setup and run time, and what the material cost. Your estimator still sets the price. They just start from your own history instead of the last number someone quoted.
How does it handle customer-specific requirements and certs?
Each customer’s requirements are attached to their part numbers and jobs: material certs, inspection reports, first article needs, special packaging, and flowdowns from their purchase orders. As a job moves toward shipping, an agent checks what’s required against what’s in your quality system and flags anything missing to the person who owns it. The records themselves stay in your quality system.
Is the software you build ours?
Yes. The system is yours: the tools we build above the compliance line, the data in them, and the quoted versus actual history your next quote depends on. We can keep extending it together, or your team can run it without us. There’s no lock-in, and no seat count to renegotiate every year.
Start with one conversation.
Recovering, growing, buying, or getting ready to sell: tell us how your company runs. We’ll show you what it could run on.
Start a conversation logan@founderwright.com