TMI / MACHINE SHOPS
TMI helps machine shops preserve hard-earned machining knowledge while building better systems for quoting, scheduling, visibility, sales, and owner freedom.
Submit your info and book a call ↗
WHY THIS IS EXPENSIVE
A good shop loses very little money at the spindle. The machines run, the parts pass inspection, and the people who set them know exactly what they are doing. What costs money sits either side of that: the two days before a quote goes out, and the three weeks after delivery when nobody can say what the job actually made.
Neither of those is a machining problem, which is why buying a better machine does not fix them. They are information problems, and they are almost always concentrated in one or two people who have been carrying the shop in their heads for twenty years.
Buyers send the same print to three shops and frequently place with whoever answers first at a credible number. A shop that quotes in two days and a shop that quotes in two hours are not competing on price. The slow weeks are the busy weeks, which is exactly when the good work shows up.
In most shops, one person reads the print, decides the setup time, and knows which customers get handled differently. None of it is written down. A fortnight of annual leave becomes a fortnight of either guessed quotes or no quotes, and a retirement becomes a cliff.
Without margin by job type, a shop keeps taking the work that feels normal. Some of that work has been quietly losing money for years, subsidised by two or three part numbers nobody has identified as the ones carrying the place.
None of this needs a new machine, and most of it does not need new software either. It needs the information that already exists in the shop to reach the person deciding.
WHERE COMPANIES GET HELD BACK
The same six things come up in almost every shop we walk. None of them are about machining.
WHAT WE LEARN ON SITE
WHAT TMI CAN BUILD
Quoting judgment is easier to capture when someone is doing the quoting. An operator inside the shop →
THE $5,000 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 machine shop it looks like this.
What the audit is, and what you get → Put a number on two of these yourself first →
THE FIRST BUILD
Intake, prints, prior-job history, and pricing logic in one flow. Most shops lose work to response time rather than to price, and this is usually the first thing worth fixing.
In practice that means an RFQ arrives into something rather than into an inbox, the last three times you ran that part are on screen while it is being priced, and a quote that goes out has a follow-up attached to it instead of relying on someone remembering.
How your estimator reads a print, where they add time, which customers get handled differently. Documented as a system that supports the estimator and survives their vacation.
This is knowledge capture, not automation. We sit with the person doing it, record the rules they apply without noticing, and put them somewhere the shop owns. The estimator keeps the judgment calls; the shop stops being one illness away from not quoting.
Load, throughput, quote hit rate, and margin by job type—so the decision to add a machine or a shift is made on the numbers rather than on how busy it feels.
The numbers almost always already exist, split between the ERP, the accounting system and a spreadsheet. Bringing them together usually changes at least one belief the shop has held for years about which work is worth taking.
THE TEST
Without asking anyone, in under a minute:
Most shops can answer three or four. That gap is the audit, and it is usually worth more than the next machine.
HOW WE START
Quoting judgment, setup knowledge and which machine takes a rush job usually live in two or three heads. We start by finding out whose, and what happens when they are out.
Submit your info and book a call ↗COMMON QUESTIONS
No. The operator owns the trade. TMI learns from the people who know the work and builds the systems, visibility, and infrastructure around their expertise.
Yes. The goal is to capture the estimator’s logic, remove repetitive coordination, improve access to information, and preserve human judgment for the decisions that require it.
Yes. When required, TMI walks the operation, follows jobs, interviews the team, maps handoffs, and builds with the people who will use the result.
Usually for the better. Most shops have an ERP holding good data behind an interface nobody enjoys. Connecting it and building focused tools on top is often faster and cheaper than replacing it.
If quoting, scheduling, and knowledge transfer are real constraints, the size of the shop matters less than whether the owner is the system. Scope changes; the problem does not.
It is late, and it is not too late, but the work changes shape. With someone still in the building the job is capture: sitting with them while they price real work and writing down the rules they apply without noticing. After they leave it becomes reconstruction from job history, which is slower, less complete and considerably more expensive.
No. Spindle-uptime dashboards answer a question most shops are not losing money on. TMI works on the information around the machining: what was quoted, what was promised, what it cost and who knows how. If machine data turns out to matter for your constraint, we will say so in the roadmap.
Only if the audit says the spreadsheet is the constraint, which it often is not. A spreadsheet that one person understands and trusts is usually better than software nobody opens. What matters is whether its logic is recoverable, whether it is connected to job history, and whether a second person can use it.
The audit is $5,000, in person or by phone, and you leave with the Intelligent Company Roadmap, which is yours outright whatever you decide to do next. The call you book from this page is the Fit Call before it: fifteen minutes, free, to work out whether TMI should be inside your shop at all.
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