One month onthe factory floorbefore a line of code.
A glass and aluminium fabricator was one signature away from buying a foreign ERP. We asked for a month inside the business first. This is what that month changed.
The situation.
A precise business, running on imprecise tools.
The company fabricates and installs windows, doors, frameless glass, curtain walls and balustrades. The engineering is exact: a sash cut two millimetres wrong is scrap. The systems around that engineering were not.
Work arrived by phone, WhatsApp and walk-in, with nothing recording the lead. Measurements were taken by hand on site and re-entered in the office, sometimes twice. Quotes were built in spreadsheets, one estimator at a time. Drawings lived in AutoCAD, frameless jobs in a separate desktop package, and cutting was planned in a standalone optimiser that knew about none of it.
Every handoff between those four tools was a person retyping numbers. They had already found a foreign cloud ERP for window fabricators and were close to buying it.
- IntakePhone, WhatsApp, walk-in. Nothing captured the lead.
- QuotingSpreadsheets and manual calculation, per estimator.
- DrawingAutoCAD, plus a second package for frameless work.
- CuttingA desktop optimiser, fed by hand, disconnected from the quote.
The method.
We asked for a month inside the business first.
Not a kickoff workshop. A month on site, in the office and on the factory floor, watching the work happen before proposing anything.
The rule for that month: ask for documents, not descriptions. A description gives you the process people believe they follow. A photo of a supplier invoice, one paper cutting list, one completed job file gives you the one they actually follow, and it answers ten questions at once.
We left with the supplier price list per profile system, real invoices, a completed frame job, a completed frameless pack, recent quotations, and the staff list with roles. Those documents became the system defaults instead of our assumptions.
Ask for documents, not descriptions.
The rule we run discovery on
The build.
The design on the canvas is the single source of truth. Everything else derives from it.
A project is one workspace holding many openings, each with its own dimensions, glass and opening type, added in place. Twenty-two windows, twenty-two measurements, one combined quotation at the end.
From that one model the platform does the rest. Nothing is typed twice.
Design on canvas
- Extraction & BOMEvery glass, hardware and accessory item with quantities. Generated, manual or hybrid per product family.
- QuotationPriced in GHS from the approved extraction, sent to the client, gated on payment.
- Cutting planKerf-aware nesting against real stock bar lengths. Bar-by-bar plan and waste percentage.
- Factory packClient overview drawing, plus per-side factory breakdowns with cutting and material lists.
The guarantees.
Built so the wrong revision cannot reach the saw.
In a fabrication business the expensive failure is not downtime. It is producing yesterday's approved drawing. Most of the work since the first demo has gone into making that structurally impossible.
This is the unglamorous half of engineering, and it is the half that protects the invoice.
- RevisionsOnly the latest extraction revision can be approved. A new one stamps its predecessor superseded and invalidates every path that depended on it.
- IntegrityDrawing files carry SHA-256 checksums. Approved or superseded revisions reject further uploads.
- ReleaseEvery factory release freezes its own numbers: extraction revision, quotation, drawing revision, file manifest.
- VisibilitySuperseded releases are never deleted. They stay on the floor, marked Do Not Produce.
