MANUFACTURING
The desk the plant already has — ERP, WMS or a spreadsheet — gets the lines keyed, the exceptions held, and the quote drafted from the drawing. A person checks every line before it ships or before it is priced.
Independent wholesalers and job shops lose the morning to retyping what a customer already sent.
PO from the inbox / 14 lines
Counter reviews the two holds before the cutoff.
Food, lumber, packaging and specialty lines. Orders from email, PDF, text and voicemail are matched to the item file. The morning counter sees only the exceptions.
Machine shops, millwork and sign shops. A live request becomes a reviewed quote in a day: print, model, drawings or a site photo with a size and an address.
Purchase orders in the inbox are read, checked against the item master and written into the ERP your buyers already trust.
THE ORDER DESK
The order is pulled from the message, matched to the item, and parked when the match is uncertain. A wrong item does not ship on a guess.
Contractor yards order early. The desk is staffed for that window so the branch is not keying yesterday’s inbox at the counter.
Item matching gets boring in one catalog before a second vertical is added. Lumber, packaging or a single specialty line — not all of them in week one.
THE QUOTE DESK
A print, a model or a set of shop drawings becomes a draft quote with material, operations and the assumptions written down.
Someone who has done the work checks dimensions and material before the quote leaves. Speed without that check is how a shop wins a job it will lose money on.
Mill certs and certificates of conformance are chased once quoting is already running. They hold a shipment. They are not a separate company.
The customer’s words and the item they resolved to.
Lines the matcher would not bet on, left for the counter.
Material, tolerance and what was not on the drawing.
The person who released the line or the price.
01
Observe
02
Map
03
Build
04
Run
05
Expand
Four to six weeks to the first production workflow, on your documents from day one.
Machine shops, millwork rooms and sign shops lose jobs because the owner was on the floor when the request came in.
Independent wholesalers still take orders by email, PDF and voicemail. The ERP does not care how the order arrived.
Cleaning the names is part of the first workflow. The pilot is yesterday’s inbox keyed against the list you actually sell.