Orchard Fabrication
Replacing eleven spreadsheets and a whiteboard with one process nobody had to be trained on
A custom metal fabricator was quoting from spreadsheets, scheduling on a whiteboard, and re-keying every job into accounting by hand. We mapped the process before automating anything — and eliminated a third of it outright.
- Process mapping
- Systems integration
- Document automation
- Azure
- Training
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Hours/week returned to shop floor
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Quote turnaround time
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Re-keyed data entries removed
Metrics pending client approval.
The situation
Orchard quoted roughly 300 custom fabrication jobs a month. The estimator worked from a spreadsheet that had been copied and modified for eleven years. Scheduling lived on a whiteboard photographed each night. Completed jobs were manually re-entered into accounting by an office manager who had never taken a vacation longer than four days, because nobody else knew the system.
What we did not do
We did not start building. The first three weeks were observation: sitting with the estimator, timing the actual steps, and — critically — cataloguing the undocumented workarounds people had invented. Those workarounds are where the real process lives. They are also the thing an automation project destroys if you skip this step.
The output of that phase was a map, and the map showed that four of the eleven spreadsheets existed only to reconcile errors introduced by the other seven. Those four did not need to be automated. They needed to stop existing.
What we built
Orchard was already paying for Microsoft 365 and had Azure credits they were not using. So most of this is configuration rather than code:
- Quoting moved into a structured application with the material and labor logic extracted from the legacy spreadsheet and, for the first time, version-controlled and tested
- Scheduling into a shared board with real capacity constraints
- Automated document generation for quotes, work orders and job packets from one data source
- Row-level security at the database tier, so a shop lead’s query returns their jobs whether or not the app remembers to filter
- A nightly sync to accounting, replacing the manual re-key
The part worth stealing
The office manager took a two-week vacation. That was the acceptance test we wrote at kickoff, and it is a better one than any dashboard.
A large share of our automation work ends with us configuring something the client already owns. It is cheaper for them, it is supported by a vendor with a security team, and it outlives us.