How we taught a tiny metal shop to automate its order chaos
Before automation: whiteboards, guesses, and panic texts
The Sokolov brothers run a five-person fabrication shop. Their “system” used to be a whiteboard, WhatsApp voice notes, and whoever shouted loudest. Drawings arrived as blurry photos, nobody knew when the plasma cutter was free, and every Friday ended with someone photographing the board so they could remember Monday’s plan.
“We don’t need software, we need more hands,” Oleg told me in December. After the third overnight shift he stopped saying that.
The stack we stitched together in three weeks
Instead of forcing an ERP, we chained together tools they already tolerated:
- Capture: a $29/month OCR plug-in watches a “New Jobs” folder inside Google Drive and rewrites every PDF into clean text.
- Brain: an off-the-shelf LLM turns that text into a checklist with material, tolerance, due date, and open questions.
- Schedule: Zapier pushes the checklist into Notion, color-coding cards based on machine load.
- Evidence: each card stores a timestamp trail so anyone can answer “Why did this part wait 6 hours?” without blaming the night shift.
The skeptical crew only trusted it once they could scribble on top. We print the generated checklist, let the foreman add grease-stained notes, snap a photo, and feed it back. Two weeks later the model stopped asking obvious questions because it finally had examples of local slang and shortcuts.
What changed inside the workshop
- Load visibility: green cards mean the machine is ready, orange cards need a human decision, red means “waiting on material.” The workshop cat now naps on green piles only.
- Customer proof: when a client begs for a rush job, we open the log and show when their files landed and who stalled the process. Arguments dropped sharply.
- Capacity: eliminating the whiteboard ping-pong freed 18 percent more machine time without buying new hardware.
We still babysit the automations. Every Friday someone scans the log for weird edge cases—handwritten job numbers, bilingual specs, or the shipyard that insists on sending faxes. But the board is gone, Saturday is quiet again, and the brothers say the biggest win is having boring afternoons where the machines hum and nobody is doom-texting the schedule at midnight.
