AI for Australian manufacturers

The problem

The office side of the factory floor

Small and mid sized manufacturers often run MYOB Advanced, Unleashed, Katana, Cin7 or a bespoke ERP, with a lot of the detail still living in spreadsheets and email. Customer RFQs arrive as PDFs and drawings. Suppliers change lead times without warning.

Quoting is often the bottleneck. The person who knows how to price a job is also the person running production.

Your stack

Manufacturing systems we connect

Checklist

Operations checklist where AI fits

• RFQ intakeRead incoming quote requests and drawings, extract quantities, materials and finish, and log them.
• Quote draftsDraft quotes from your costing rules and past similar jobs for the estimator to adjust.
• Purchase order matchingMatch supplier confirmations against purchase orders and flag price or date changes.
• Production notesTurn shift handover notes into a structured log.
• Quality recordsDraft non conformance reports and corrective actions from inspection notes.
• Supplier riskSummarise supplier lead time changes each week.

Over time

What the office looks like once quoting is under control

When quotes go out faster, sales teams can follow up while the customer is still deciding, and fewer jobs are lost to slower competitors. Estimators stop being the single point of failure, because past jobs, costing rules and supplier prices sit in one searchable place. Purchasing staff get early warning of lead time slips rather than learning about them when the truck does not arrive. Quality managers spend less time formatting reports before an ISO 9001 surveillance audit. The production floor feels it indirectly: fewer rushed jobs, clearer work orders and less time waiting on information from the office. For job shops and fabricators, we often connect drawings, nesting software and the ERP so a quote can show material, machine time and labour with clear assumptions. Customers see a tidier quote, and your estimator can defend the price because the working is visible.

First steps

Where a manufacturer can begin

Guardrails

Quality, safety and supplier data

Customer drawings and pricing are confidential, and safety records carry legal obligations under WHS law. We keep sensitive files in controlled systems and keep qualified people responsible for safety and quality sign off.

People first

Estimators, planners and supervisors

Estimators get faster first drafts and spend more time on tricky jobs. Planners spend less time chasing suppliers. Supervisors get clearer handovers between shifts. We plan training on the floor and in the office, and we involve the people who know the workarounds, because every factory has them.