Contract Manufacturing

Custom internal systems for contract manufacturers whose quoting and scheduling still run on tribal knowledge.

A contract shop is a promise factory. Every job is a promise made in a quote, renegotiated through revisions, scheduled against finite machines and people, and proven at final inspection. The office estimates from memory, the floor runs from a whiteboard, and the truth about whether a job made money arrives weeks after the parts shipped. The work is too specific to your shop for generic software—and too important to keep in people’s heads.

Praxyt builds the internal systems that connect the front office to the floor: RFQ intake, quote history, revision control, job packets, capacity-aware scheduling, and quality workflows—built around how your shop actually runs.

• RFQs arrive everywhere and die somewhere

  Requests for quote come in by email, phone, customer portals, and the occasional napkin sketch. There is no single intake log, no response clock, and no way to see which RFQs are waiting on drawings, which are being estimated, and which were simply forgotten.

• Drawing collection and revision roulette

  The quote goes out against revision C while the shop is holding revision B and the customer just emailed revision D to one salesperson. Drawing packages live in inboxes and shared drives, and “which rev are we building?” is answered by walking to the floor.

• Quote history is archaeology

  Answering “what did we quote this part last time—and did we make money on it?” means digging through old emails and spreadsheets. Win and loss reasons are never captured, so every repeat RFQ starts from memory instead of evidence.

• Job packets assembled by hand

  Travelers get printed, drawings get stapled, BOMs come from a different system, and certs get photocopied at the last minute. A missing page stops a machine; a wrong page ships the wrong rev.

• Capacity planning is a whiteboard

  The schedule assumes every machine, welder, and work center is always available. Promise dates are negotiated from optimism, and the first real picture of the week appears when the floor lead updates the whiteboard on Monday morning.

• Scrap and rework vanish into the floor

  Parts get scrapped or reworked with a reason nobody writes down. There is no trail from a nonconformance back to the setup, the material lot, or the operator note that would prevent the next one.

• Estimated versus actual is a quarter-end guess

  Job costs are known only after accounting closes the month. By the time anyone learns a part family loses money, the customer has already sent the repeat order at the old price.

• RFQ intake and pipeline—one log, drawing checklists, response clocks, and follow-up queues
• Quote builder with searchable history, current material cost roll-ups, and win/loss capture
• Revision control tying quotes, job packets, and shop documents to a single drawing rev
• Digital job packets—traveler, BOM, drawings, certs—released to the floor as one package
• Capacity planning board that knows about machine availability, staffing, and outside operations
• Production schedule with due-date risk flags instead of a whiteboard and good intentions
• Quality workflow for in-process checks, nonconformances, and scrap or rework reason codes
• Estimated-versus-actual job performance dashboard fed by time and material actuals

Integration considerations

The ERP stays the system of record: customers, sales orders, inventory, invoices. The operational layer reads what it needs and writes back what matters—converted quotes, job actuals, quality results. Drawing and document storage integrates with wherever files already live; customer POs arrive by email or portal and get captured at intake rather than re-keyed. Time capture for estimated-versus-actual can start as simple as a tablet at each work center; machine-data integration is possible but rarely the right first step. Material and outside-operation costs come from vendor quotes and POs, which is why chasing those responses is part of the workflow, not an afterthought.

What better looks like

• Faster, more consistent quoting. Every RFQ has a clock and an owner, and every repeat quote starts from history instead of memory.
• Revision mistakes stop shipping. The rev on the floor is the rev that was quoted, and changes trigger re-quotes before they trigger remakes.
• Promise dates you can defend. Scheduling against real capacity turns due-date conversations from negotiation into information.
• Scrap becomes data. Reason codes and nonconformance trails turn rework from a cost of doing business into a fixable list.
• Pricing from evidence. Estimated-versus-actual visibility means the next quote reflects what the last job really cost.

Do you have this problem?

• Can you list every open RFQ right now, with what it is waiting on and when a response is due?
• When a customer sends a new drawing revision, how do you know every open quote and live job got it?
• Can you see what you quoted a similar part last time—and whether that job actually made money?
• Does your schedule know when a machine, a welder, or an inspector is genuinely unavailable?
• Do scrapped and reworked parts carry a reason code that anyone ever reviews?
• Do you find out a job lost money before or after you quote the repeat order?

If several of these hit home, a Workflow Review will show which handoff to systematize first—and how long an internal tool takes to build sets honest expectations for the first project.

Questions contract manufacturers ask us