You're a 25-person fabrication shop running CNC turret punching, pressbrake folding, CNC routing and a full design office — quoting custom architectural work all day. We recently audited a steel fabrication & construction business almost exactly your size. Here's what we found in theirs, and what we'd look for in yours.
Same world as yours — custom fabrication, project-based work, a small office team holding it all together, and an expensive software stack bought to fix it. Here's what the audit surfaced.
These are the patterns we find in nearly every fabrication and project-based manufacturer this size. We won't know which ones bite until we map it with you — but this is where the money usually hides.
Custom architectural work means every job is a fresh quote. If pricing logic lives in one or two estimators' heads — and proposals take hours to build off CAD/Solidworks takeoffs — that's both a bottleneck and a key-person risk.
Design (CAD), the job/shop floor system, and accounting rarely integrate cleanly. Every hand re-key between them is time you pay for twice — exactly what cost the business above $31,200/yr.
On project work, extra work done on site or in the shop often never makes it onto the invoice. Slow or missed invoicing is the single most common cash-flow leak we find.
In competitive fabrication, the first sharp quote back usually gets the look. If enquiries sit while the estimator is buried, you lose work on speed, not price.
Without clean time and material capture from the floor, most shops can tell you what they invoiced — not which jobs actually made money. You can't optimise what you can't see.
Nearly every audit finds modules and subscriptions paid for but never switched on. Sometimes the fix is configuration, not new spend — occasionally the new stack is cheaper than the old.
The fabrication business above didn't think they had a $67,600/yr problem until we mapped it. The only way to know yours is to look. That's what this conversation is about.