Machine Shops
Quote faster. Reduce status chasing. Protect job margins.
Your team should not be losing hours every week digging through prints, checking material notes, rebuilding quote packages, answering job-status emails, or chasing down inspection records.
MVP.dev builds AI automation systems for machine shops that plug into the tools you already use, including JobBOSS², E2 Shop System, Global Shop Solutions, ProShop ERP, ECI M1, Epicor Kinetic, Fulcrum, Paperless Parts, Mastercam, SOLIDWORKS, Fusion 360, High QA, InspectionXpert, MachineMetrics, and QuickBooks Online.
We help shops turn RFQs faster, reduce front-office bottlenecks, improve job visibility, and give owners a clearer view of schedule risk and margin leakage.
Production-ready in 3 to 4 weeks.
Get a Workflow Fit Assessment See the Machine Shops Automation DemosBuilt for shops with demand, but too many manual handoffs
This is for CNC machine shops, job shops, precision manufacturers, contract manufacturers, fabrication shops, and aerospace or medical component suppliers that are already busy and want more quoting capacity, cleaner handoffs, and better visibility without replacing their current systems.
You are likely a strong fit if:
- RFQs sit too long because estimators are buried in prints, emails, and old jobs
- Customer service keeps interrupting production or planning to ask where jobs stand
- Job margins are not clear until after the work is already complete
- Quality documents, certs, inspection notes, and work instructions are hard to find
- Your shop uses JobBOSS, ProShop, Global Shop, E2, M1, Epicor, or a similar shop stack
- You want improvements inside your current workflow, not a disruptive ERP migration
If your shop is growing but quoting, scheduling, quality, and customer updates still depend on tribal knowledge and manual follow-up, there is almost certainly time and margin trapped inside the workflow.
The fastest wins we usually find
RFQ intake and quote package prep
Slow quoting loses good work before your estimator ever gets a fair shot at it.
We build RFQ workflows that read inbound emails, prints, notes, material requirements, quantities, due dates, and customer history, then prepare a structured quote packet for estimator review.
The goal is simple:
- RFQs captured the same day
- Prints and requirements summarized
- Similar past jobs surfaced
- Missing details flagged before estimating starts
For many shops, this can recover 6 to 12 estimating hours per week and reduce quote turnaround from several days to 24 to 48 hours for common repeat or near-repeat work.
See the RFQ-to-Proposal Demo →Customer status updates without interrupting the floor
Every status email seems small until your planner, lead machinist, or office manager gets pulled into the same questions all day.
We build customer-response workflows that answer common questions from approved job, shipment, and order data, then draft or route replies for human review when needed.
Your team gets a clean path for:
- Order status questions
- Ship-date requests
- Missing information follow-up
- Basic document requests
- Escalations when a job is at risk
A small shop can often remove 5 to 10 hours of weekly status chasing while giving customers faster answers and fewer vague updates.
See the Customer Response Demo →Job margin and schedule visibility before the damage is done
Finding out a job lost money after it ships does not help you protect the next one.
We build production and margin dashboards that combine job data, labor, machine activity, quoted hours, material costs, due dates, and open exceptions into one owner-ready view.
Each weekly view can show:
- Jobs running over quoted hours
- Late or at-risk work orders
- Material or outside-process delays
- Margin risk by customer or job type
- Recommended actions for the week
The goal is not another dashboard for display. The goal is catching margin and schedule problems early enough to act.
See the Shop Dashboard Demo →Quality records, work instructions, and tribal knowledge retrieval
When a setup note, inspection record, cert, or customer requirement takes 20 minutes to find, the whole shop pays for it.
We build cited-answer systems that let approved users ask plain-English questions across procedures, inspection documents, setup notes, customer specs, corrective actions, and quality records.
Every answer includes a source trail so staff can verify it before using it.
- No blind answers
- No unsupported claims
- No guessing from memory
This can reduce time spent hunting for quality and production information by 20 to 30 percent in document-heavy shops, especially those serving aerospace, defense, or medical customers.
See the Knowledge Base Demo →Your current tools stay in place
We build the workflow layer around your existing shop management, quoting, CAD/CAM, inspection, machine monitoring, and accounting environment.
Supported and common systems include:
Your ERP stays where it is. Your CAD and CAM work stays where it is. Your inspection and quality records stay in the systems your team already uses.
We add the workflow layer that reads, routes, summarizes, flags exceptions, and writes back when appropriate.
Three focused offers
RFQ Acceleration System
For shops losing good work because quote turnaround is too slow or too dependent on one estimator.
Includes
- RFQ intake mapping
- Email and attachment parsing
- Print and requirement summaries
- Similar-job lookup
- Missing-information checklist
- Estimator review queue
- Quote package handoff documentation
Best for
- Job shops
- High-mix CNC shops
- Repeat-part manufacturers
- Shops with estimator bottlenecks
Shop Visibility and Margin Control System
For owners and operators who need earlier warning on jobs that are slipping, running long, or eating margin.
Includes
- Job data source review
- Labor and machine-hour inputs
- Quoted-versus-actual tracking
- Schedule risk flags
- Exception queues
- Owner-ready dashboards
- Weekly narrative summaries
- Workflow handoff documentation
Best for
- CNC machine shops
- Contract manufacturers
- Multi-cell production teams
- Shops with late margin surprises
- Operators managing by spreadsheet
Quality and Knowledge Retrieval System
For shops where quality records, work instructions, certs, and customer requirements are hard to find fast.
Includes
- Document source review
- Quality record indexing
- Work instruction retrieval
- Customer spec lookup
- Cited answers with source links
- Role-based access rules
- Human review workflow
Best for
- ISO 9001 shops
- AS9100 suppliers
- Medical component manufacturers
- Defense and aerospace suppliers
Start with one workflow. Prove the ROI. Expand from there.
You do not need a full digital transformation project to get value.
The safest path is to pick one painful workflow, improve it, measure the results, and then expand once the system proves itself.
Most shops start with one of these:
- RFQ intake and quote packet preparation
- Customer status updates
- Job margin and schedule dashboards
- Quality document retrieval
- Material cert and inspection record lookup
- Purchase order, invoice, and vendor review
This keeps the first project focused, measurable, and easier to approve.
Typical engagement range
Most machine shop workflow builds start with a focused pilot.
Starter Workflow Pilot
Best for one high-value workflow
$7,500 to $15,000
Shop Workflow Buildout
Best for multiple workflows or more complex shop operations
$15,000 to $40,000
Ongoing Optimization and Support
Best for shops that want continuous improvement, reporting, new workflows, and support
$1,500 to $7,500 per month
Final pricing depends on workflow count, system access, data quality, ERP complexity, approval rules, security requirements, and whether the workflow writes back into production systems.
The first step is not a giant commitment. It is a workflow fit assessment that identifies the fastest path to measurable ROI.
What waiting costs
Manual shop workflows do not just waste office time. They limit quoting speed, schedule control, and margin visibility.
Every month you delay:
- Estimators spend time organizing RFQs instead of pricing work
- Good customers wait too long for quotes
- Planners and supervisors get interrupted for status updates
- Owners find margin problems after the job is already shipped
- Quality staff lose time searching for documents and records
- Growth requires more office headcount instead of better throughput
If your shop is already at capacity, better workflow is not a side project. It is how you create capacity without simply adding more people.
How the engagement works
Week 1: Find the highest-value leak
We review your RFQ process, job status workflow, production reporting, quality document flow, or vendor and purchasing process.
You get:
- Workflow map
- Opportunity ranking
- KPI targets
- Fixed-scope recommendation
- Implementation plan
We define success before building anything.
Week 2: Build against your real workflow
We connect to the systems, documents, exports, job records, customer files, quality records, or reporting data needed for the selected workflow.
We build around your actual shop process, not a generic manufacturing template.
Week 3: Test, tune, and review
We run real historical examples through the workflow in staging. For RFQ workflows, this can include prior quote requests, prints, emails, and awarded or lost jobs so the system can be tested against known patterns.
You see:
- Accuracy results
- Exceptions
- Failure cases
- Confidence thresholds
- Review queue behavior
- Estimated time savings
Nothing goes live until the workflow is validated.
Week 4: Deploy, monitor, and support
We deploy the workflow, train the relevant users, monitor initial results, and support the first production cycle.
You get:
- Production workflow
- Dashboard or review queue
- Documentation
- Admin handoff
- 30 days of support
- Recommendations for the next workflow
Most builds are designed to pay back in 6 to 8 weeks of live use, depending on volume, labor cost, workflow scope, and how much estimator, planner, quality, or office time is recovered.
Built for controlled shop and customer data
Machine shop workflows often include customer prints, pricing, quality records, export-controlled files, and supplier information. The system has to be controlled, auditable, and reviewable.
Our systems are designed around:
- Least-privilege access
- Encrypted data in transit and at rest
- Role-based access by customer, job, and department
- Audit logs for AI-assisted decisions
- Source-grounded answers for quality and technical documents
- Human review thresholds for customer-facing or production-impacting actions
- Client-owned cloud deployment when required
- Support for ITAR, EAR, DFARS, NIST 800-171, CMMC, ISO 9001, and AS9100-driven controls when applicable
For shops with defense, aerospace, medical, or customer confidentiality requirements, we design the implementation around your security requirements from the start.
Example outcomes
| Workflow | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| RFQ intake | Emails, prints, notes, and specs reviewed manually before estimating starts | Structured quote packet with missing details and similar jobs surfaced |
| Customer status updates | Office staff interrupt planners or the floor for job updates | Drafted answers from approved job data with escalation for risky jobs |
| Job margin review | Quoted-versus-actual issues found after shipment | At-risk jobs flagged while there is still time to act |
| Quality document lookup | Staff search folders, emails, and old records by memory | Cited answers from approved quality records and work instructions |
| Schedule visibility | Status buried in ERP screens, spreadsheets, and shop-floor conversations | One review queue showing late, blocked, and margin-risk jobs |
Why MVP.dev
MVP.dev builds AI business operating systems, internal tools, and workflow layers for companies that need real operational outcomes, not AI experiments.
You get:
- 25 years of software architecture and delivery experience
- AI automation strategy and implementation under one roof
- Practical systems built around existing workflows
- Human-in-the-loop design where accuracy matters
- Clear KPIs before development starts
- Production-minded delivery, not prototype theater
The goal is not to impress your team with AI.
The goal is to give them time back, reduce operational drag, and help the shop produce more value with the people and systems it already has.
Building the operating playbook too?
Our partners at osforyour.business/machine-shops cover the org-design, process, and people side of running a modern machine shop. We handle the execution layer that makes it run, so the system they help you design actually delivers the hours back.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much time or money can this save?
It depends on quote volume, job count, and how much work is still handled manually. In many small and mid-sized shops, RFQ prep, customer status updates, and quality document lookup can recover 8 to 20 staff hours per week. If that time is tied to an estimator, planner, office manager, or quality lead, that can translate to roughly $2,500 to $10,000 per month in recovered capacity or avoided overhead. During Week 1, we define the target KPIs before the build starts.
Will this work with our ERP or shop management system?
Usually, yes. We build around the systems you already use, such as JobBOSS, E2, Global Shop Solutions, ProShop ERP, M1, Epicor, Fulcrum, Cetec, Paperless Parts, or exports from those systems. If an API is available, we use it. If not, we can often work from approved reports, exports, documents, or controlled data feeds.
Will this replace JobBOSS, ProShop, Global Shop, E2, or our CAD/CAM software?
No. The goal is to improve the workflow around your current stack, not force a migration. Your ERP, CAD, CAM, inspection, accounting, and document systems stay in place. The workflow layer reads, routes, summarizes, flags exceptions, and writes back only where appropriate and approved.
Can this read prints and technical documents?
It can help extract and summarize useful information from many PDFs, drawings, RFQ packets, work instructions, specs, and quality documents. We still design technical and production-impacting outputs with human review. The system should reduce prep and search time, not let unsupported guesses reach the floor.
Can this help with ITAR, CMMC, AS9100, or customer confidentiality requirements?
Yes, we can design the implementation around those requirements. That may include least-privilege access, encryption, audit logs, role-based controls, client-owned cloud deployment, source trails, and restrictions on which files or customers the system can access.
Is AI making production or quality decisions?
No. The system can classify, summarize, recommend, route, and prepare actions, but review thresholds control what happens next. For quoting, quality, customer commitments, and production-impacting workflows, outputs should be reviewed or approved by the right person before action is taken.
What is the first step?
Start with a workflow fit assessment. We identify the workflow with the highest ROI potential, estimate the time or margin impact, and recommend a focused pilot. You will know what should be built, why it matters, what it should cost, and how success will be measured before committing to a full implementation.
Get the quoting time, office hours, and margin visibility back
If your shop is still relying on manual RFQ prep, status chasing, spreadsheet reporting, or tribal knowledge to run daily work, there is likely a faster way to operate.
MVP.dev can help you identify the highest-value workflow, build the workflow layer, and deploy it inside your current machine shop stack.
Get a Workflow Fit Assessment See the Machine Shops Automation Demos