When a job is marked shipped, the system pulls the quoted hours and material, actual labor from the time clock, and material and subcontract costs from the ERP, then calculates the job's margin. A weekly report ranks jobs by margin gap and flags overruns.
Typical results
100%
Of closed jobs compared with their quote
≈11 hrs/mo
Office time no longer spent compiling job costs
20%
Overrun level that flags an operation
Figures reflect typical results for this kind of automation.
The challenge
A fabrication shop quotes every job on estimated hours and steel weight, but rarely checks how the job really went. Labor sits in the time clock, material and subcontract invoices in the ERP, and pulling them together takes about 12 hours a month, so only a few jobs get reviewed and estimates keep repeating the same mistakes.
Before and after
Weeks from shipping to a known job margin
−83%Closed jobs reviewed against their quote
3.3×Office hours per month compiling job costs
−92%The automation
When a job is marked shipped, the automation pulls the quoted hours and material from the estimate, actual labor hours per operation from the time clock, and material issues and subcontract invoices such as galvanizing from the ERP. It calculates the job's actual cost and margin. A weekly report ranks closed jobs by margin gap and highlights operations that ran more than 20% over estimate. Actual hours feed back into the estimating sheet for similar parts.
How it works
- 01
Job marked shipped
Marking a job shipped in the ERP starts the costing for that job number.
- 02
Quote, hours and costs pulled
Quoted hours and material from the estimate, time clock hours per operation, and material issues and subcontract invoices are collected by job number.
- 03
Margin calculated
Actual labor is costed at the shop rate, added to material and subcontract costs, and compared with the quoted price to give the job's margin.
- 04
Weekly margin report
Every Monday, a report ranks last week's closed jobs by margin gap and highlights any operation more than 20% over its estimate.
- 05
Hours fed back to estimating
Actual hours per operation are written to the estimating sheet next to similar parts, so the next quote starts from real numbers.
Starts from
- Estimate and quote
- Time clock hours
- ERP material and invoices
Delivers
- Weekly margin report
- Over-estimate flags
- Actuals for estimating
The impact
Every shipped job has a known margin within a week instead of about six weeks, and the office stops compiling costs by hand. The estimator sees which operations run over, such as fitting or welding on certain connection types, and quotes for similar parts start from real hours.
Questions about this automation
What if labor hours are not booked to a job number?
The report depends on workers clocking hours against a job and operation, usually with a barcode on the job traveler. Hours without a job are listed separately each week so the supervisor can assign them, and the share of unassigned hours stays on the report until it is close to zero.
Where does it get the cost data?
It reads estimates from the estimating spreadsheet or quoting tool, labor from the time clock system, and material issues, purchase invoices and shipping status from the ERP. If one of these systems has no API, a scheduled export to a shared folder works as the source instead.
How is this usually rolled out?
This is a multi-step build, usually rolled out in stages. The first stage matches jobs across the three sources and checks the numbers against a few jobs costed by hand, then the weekly report goes live, and the feedback into estimating comes last.