TMI / FABRICATION
TMI helps fabrication shops get estimating logic out of one person's head, keep material and weld documentation traceable without a filing cabinet, and read job cost while the job can still be changed.
Submit your info and book a call ↗
WHY THIS IS EXPENSIVE
Fabrication is estimated once and paid for once, and everything in between is absorbed. A takeoff that missed the handling, a weld procedure that needed requalifying, a plate ordered at the wrong grade, a revision that arrived after the material was cut — each of them is survivable and none of them is visible until the job is closed.
The shop floor is rarely where it goes wrong. Fitters and welders do the work well and know when a drawing is wrong before the office does. What leaks is the record: the estimating judgement that lives in one head, the mill certs in a folder nobody can search, the weld map kept on a clipboard, and a job cost that arrives weeks after anyone could have acted on it.
A job that is going to overrun shows the signs in week two. If cost is only assembled when the job closes, the information arrives after the only moment it could have changed anything, and the same estimate gets used on the next one.
Mill certs, weld procedures, welder qualifications and inspection reports are the proof that the work is what the contract says. When they live in paper folders and three inboxes, producing a package for a client takes days, and a missing document can hold payment.
Estimating in a fab shop is judgement about fit-up time, handling, access and what this particular client will argue about. When it sits with one person, the business can only quote as fast as that person works, and it cannot quote at all when they are away.
None of this needs a new machine or a bigger bay. It needs what the shop already produces — the takeoff, the heat number, the weld map, the hours — to land somewhere searchable on the day it happens.
WHERE COMPANIES GET HELD BACK
The same six things come up in almost every fab shop we walk. None of them are about welding.
WHAT WE LEARN ON SITE
WHAT TMI CAN BUILD
Estimating judgement is easiest to capture while someone is doing the estimating. An operator inside the business →
THE $25,000 AUDIT, READ THROUGH THIS TRADE
The audit is the same instrument in every company: ten areas, ten points each, scored against a written rubric. What changes is what we go looking for. In a fab shop it is mostly estimating judgement and the traceability record.
What the audit is, and what you get → What your software sprawl costs → What the repeat work costs →
THE FIRST BUILD
Hours, material and rework against the estimate, readable in week two rather than after delivery. This is usually first because it is the only one that changes the outcome of jobs already in the shop.
The hard part is the estimate itself. Comparing against a number nobody wrote down the basis for proves nothing, so the first job is usually making the estimate explicit enough to be compared against.
Heat numbers, mill certs, weld procedures, welder qualifications and inspection records captured against the job as the work happens, so the client package is generated rather than assembled.
The hard part is capture at the point of work. A fitter will not open a laptop, so the record has to be taken where the weld happens, by the person who did it, in less time than writing it on a clipboard takes.
The allowances, the rules of thumb and the client-specific judgement written down as the shop actually applies them, then built into the quoting flow so the logic survives the estimator's holiday.
The hard part is admitting how much of the price is judgement. Writing down an allowance makes it arguable, which is exactly why it is worth doing and exactly why estimators resist it at first.
THE TEST
Without asking anyone, in under a minute:
Most fab shops can answer three or four, and usually not the ones about cost. That gap is the audit, and it is normally worth more than the next piece of plant.
HOW WE START
Fit-up allowances, which client argues about what, and how much handling a particular job really needs usually live in one or two heads. We start by finding out whose, and what happens to the quote log when they take two weeks off.
Submit your info and book a call ↗COMMON QUESTIONS
No, and the difference matters. A machine shop prices parts and repeats them; a fab shop prices projects it will build once, and carries a documentation burden — mill certs, weld procedures, inspection records — that precision machining mostly does not. The audit is the same instrument; what it goes looking for is different.
Usually not. The problem is rarely the software and almost always that the judgement around it was never written down. TMI starts by capturing how your estimator actually prices work, which is useful whatever tool it eventually lives in.
No. The trade belongs to the people doing it, and the procedures belong to whoever qualified them. TMI builds the system that makes the record of the work reachable without walking to the shop.
TMI does not write or approve weld procedures and does not act as a quality authority — that is your QC function and your inspection body. What TMI builds is the system that captures, stores and produces the documentation those requirements generate.
Revision control is one of the most common findings in a fab shop. The aim is not to stop changes; it is to make sure the floor is working from the current drawing and that what a late change cost is visible rather than absorbed.
Readable job cost usually means weekly rather than live, because the inputs are time and material and both are recorded by people. Weekly against estimate, while the job is still in the shop, is the difference that matters.
Less than owners expect. Most shops already hold the data somewhere; it is in a spreadsheet, a folder, an accounting package and the estimator's memory. Connecting those is the Data Foundation stage and it comes before anything is built on top.
The audit comes first and it is a fixed $25,000. What follows is scoped from the roadmap it produces, because the honest answer depends on how much of the estimating and the traceability is still on paper.
Yes. The documentation burden is lighter in sheet metal and the estimating problem is usually heavier, because volume and variety are both higher. The shape of the work changes; the pattern does not.
SHOW US THE SHOP