Quote from real cost, plan against real capacity, and find out what the job made before the next one is quoted.
Early accessCubeERP for engineering & fabrication
ERP for subcontract machinists, fabricators and engineering firms working to drawing, to order and to a promised date.
- Engineering
- UK hosted, implemented on site
- 01234 672 617
Subcontract engineering is a business of one-offs and small batches, where every job is slightly different and the estimate is frequently the only thing standing between a profitable year and a busy one.
The systems that fail here are the ones that assume repeat production. CubeERP is built around the job: an enquiry with a drawing attached becomes an estimate, the estimate becomes a works order with a routing, the shop floor books against it, and the finished job reports what it actually cost against what was quoted.
- Per job
Quoted versus actual, every time
- Per operation
Time booked where it happened
- Attached
Certification issued with despatch
What goes wrong
The recurring problems in engineering
Not every business has all five. Almost every business we speak to has three.
Estimates built on memory
Quoting from what a similar job "usually takes" works until the mix changes. Without recorded actuals there is no feedback loop, so the same optimistic assumption is repeated for years.
Drawings and revisions everywhere
Customer drawings arrive by email, get saved to a shared drive, and are superseded without the shop floor being told. Parts made to a superseded revision are scrap plus a difficult phone call.
Material buying by the job
Bar, plate and section bought per job, with offcuts nobody records. Stock exists physically and not in any system, so it is bought again.
Capacity promised by feel
Delivery dates are agreed in the sales office based on how busy the floor looked that morning. The plan is a whiteboard and the sequence changes with whoever asks last.
Certification as paperwork
Material certificates, weld procedures, NDT reports and inspection records live in folders. Producing a full pack for a customer is a manual retrieval exercise every time.
What we do about it
How CubeERP is set up for engineering
Configuration, not a separate edition. Everything here is in the same product - it is switched on and shaped during implementation.
Estimating from real data
Material, machine time, labour and treatment costed line by line, with a comparison to what similar jobs actually cost rather than what they were quoted at.
Routings for one-offs
Operation sequences per job, including sub-contract heat treatment, plating and coating, with set-up and run times separated so batch size affects the price properly.
Shop-floor booking
Clock on and off jobs at a touchscreen, with scrap, rework and downtime captured at the operation rather than reconstructed at the end of the week.
Material and offcuts
Bar, plate and section tracked with remnant management, so usable offcuts are visible before more material is bought.
Certification packs
Material certificates, test results and inspection records held against the batch and issued with the despatch documentation automatically.
Job profitability
Quoted versus actual on every job, by customer, part and machine - which is the only reliable way to find out which work is worth having.
In practice
Two situations from this sector
Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations businesses describe before they change anything.
A customer nobody wanted to lose
The situation
A machining subcontractor had one customer accounting for a large share of turnover and assumed it was their best account. Job cost was never recorded at part level.
What changed
Actual job costing showed two part families were consistently loss-making. Prices were renegotiated on evidence, the customer accepted most of it, and the account stayed - profitably.
Set-up time nobody charged for
The situation
Set-up was bundled into an hourly rate. Small batches of complex parts were priced almost identically to large ones, and the small ones were the popular repeat orders.
What changed
Set-up and run time were separated in estimating. Small-batch pricing rose to reflect reality, and the work mix shifted towards batches the shop was actually set up to make.
How it happens
What implementation involves
The same five stages whatever you make. Discovery, training and go-live are done on your site, because most of what the system needs to know is learned in the building.
- 1
Discovery
A structured session mapping how you work now - the systems, the spreadsheets and the bits held together by one person’s memory. We come back with what the platform covers as standard, what needs configuration, and what needs building.
- 2
Configuration
Your sites, warehouses, price lists, approval limits, document templates, workflows and permissions set up to match the business - not a demo tenant with your logo dropped on it.
- 3
Data migration
Customers, suppliers, parts, bills of materials, price lists, open orders and stock balances brought across and reconciled. We migrate, you check the numbers against the old system, and only then do we cut over.
- 4
Training & rollout
Role-based training so the order desk learns the order desk and the warehouse learns the warehouse, with a pilot group first where it makes sense. Documentation and short screen recordings left behind for new starters.
- 5
Ongoing support
UK support from the people who built the platform, with a named contact, agreed response times, and a product roadmap you can influence.
Questions
What this sector asks first
Yes - that is the normal case in a job shop rather than the exception. Jobs can be created from an estimate without a pre-existing part record, and a repeat order can be created from a past job in a couple of clicks.
Yes, with revision control. The revision issued to the floor is recorded, and superseding a drawing flags any open works orders built to the previous revision.
Heat treatment, plating, painting, NDT and similar are routing operations with their own purchase orders. Material sent out is tracked, and receipt books straight back into the job.
Remnants can be booked back into stock with dimensions and located, so the next job that needs a similar size finds them before purchasing raises an order.
Bills of materials and cut lists can be imported, and the API allows a nesting or CAM system to push part and time data in. We would rather integrate what works than replace it.
Where to start
The parts that usually matter most here
Job Costing Software
Know what every job actually cost - materials, labour, sub-contract and overhead - while it is running, not six weeks later.
Read moreQuoting & Estimating Software
Build quotes from live material costs, labour rates and real availability - then convert the winners to orders without retyping them.
Read moreManufacturing Software
Bills of materials, works orders, routings, shop-floor booking and real job costing - for businesses that make things to order.
Read moreProduction Planning Software
Schedule works orders against real capacity - people, machines and shifts - and see the effect of a rush job before you accept it.
Read more
Related
Sectors with similar problems
- Plastics & Rubber MouldingERP for moulders and extruders - tooling, cycle times, cavity counts, regrind and machine data from the shop floor.
- Automotive & Vehicle PartsERP for automotive suppliers and parts distributors - schedules and call-offs, EDI, traceability and delivery performance that is measured.
- Building Products & Construction SupplyERP for manufacturers and suppliers of building products - configured items, site deliveries, call-offs and long-running projects.
If your process really is unusual
Some requirements are specific to one business rather than one sector. Those get built against the same documented API everybody else uses - not bolted on to the side of a database nobody is allowed to look at.
Engineering
Show us a real job from your engineering operation
Bring one order that went wrong and the paperwork that went with it. That tells us more about whether this fits than any list of features.