Your MRP already knows which jobs will be late. It just isn't telling you.

I build the production planning and analysis layer that small manufacturers need and can't buy — finite schedulers, material shortage analysis, capacity and delivery dashboards — on top of the MRP data you already have. No ERP replacement. No subscription. You own the result outright.

Call (469) 570-2443 Book a free plant walkthrough

Sound familiar?

You find out a raw material is short when the operator goes to weigh it up — not two weeks earlier.
The schedule is “finite capacity” in name only. Nobody can say what actually runs Thursday.
On-time delivery gets reported monthly, by hand, and nobody fully trusts the percentage.
Your ERP vendor quoted six figures and an 18-month implementation to fix it.

What I build

Five kinds of tool, all of them reading the data your plant already produces.

Finite capacity schedulers. Real start times per line and shift that respect your holiday calendar and re-sequence the moment you change a priority.
Material shortage analysis. Every open order walked in due-date sequence against real on-hand inventory — including approved substitutes — sorted into what can run, what is short, and what is about to stop a line.
Capacity and delivery dashboards. Committed hours against available hours by line and week, shift efficiency, on-time delivery, and late-order exposure by customer.
Automated data extraction. A scheduled overnight pull from your database so every tool opens on current numbers, with no manual export step.
Quality and variance checks. Batch weights outside recipe tolerance, flagged before the product ships.

Start with a two-week assessment

$2,850 fixed — credited in full toward your first build.

I could quote you a scheduler today, but it would be a guess, and a fixed-price guess is bad for both of us. So the first engagement is two weeks and it ends with a written answer rather than a system.

Data inventory. Every table, report and export your systems produce — what's in them, what's reliable, and what quietly isn't.
Findings report. The specific gaps costing you money, with the mechanism spelled out. Named reports, named fields, named failure modes — not a maturity score.
Prioritized build roadmap. Every opportunity ranked by payback against effort, with a fixed price beside each one.
A working proof of concept. One real tool, built on your live data. You keep it whether or not you hire me again.

Builds run $4,500 to $35,000, quoted as a fixed price after the assessment, based on what the roadmap actually says.

What this looks like in practice

Scheduling rule

15 of 18

outsourced jobs were quietly running late under a scheduling rule that reported zero late. The rule ignored the real turnaround on work that leaves the plant and comes back.

Material shortages

19 orders

moved from “material short” to “can run” once approved substitute materials were pooled into the availability check. The inventory was already on site.

Findings from tools now running daily inside a DFW compounding plant. Details anonymized.

How I build

These conventions exist because each one was learned the hard way. Together they're the answer to what happens to your tool after I'm no longer involved.

An Instructions tab on every tool. It rebuilds itself on every refresh so it cannot go stale. This is how a tool outlives the person who asked for it.
Missing data is flagged, never hidden. A record that silently vanishes because a lookup failed is the worst thing a reporting tool can do.
Data read by column name, never by position. So a report gaining a column upstream can't shift every number downstream by one.
A documented rule is not a control. Where a convention matters enough to depend on, it ships with a checker that fails when documentation and reality drift apart.
Your numbers reconcile to your system of record, on the page. If a figure differs from what your MRP shows, the tool displays why.
You own everything at handover. Source code and documentation transfer to you in writing. No licence, no subscription, no lock-in.

Is this a fit?

A good fit

20–300 employees, one or two plants in Dallas–Fort Worth
An MRP, ERP or Access system holding good data you can't get at
Scheduling and purchasing still run on spreadsheets and experience
Not operating under ISO 13485, FDA or AS9100 validation requirements

Probably not a fit

You need validated, audit-trailed software for a regulated product
You want a per-seat SaaS platform with a vendor support desk
Nobody internally owns the data, or nobody wants this to change
You're mid-way through a full ERP replacement already

Capacity is limited to two engagements at a time. Availability quoted at first contact.

Start with a free 60-minute plant walkthrough

No cost, no obligation, no presentation. I walk your floor, sit with whoever sequences production and whoever buys material, and tell you honestly whether there's anything here worth doing.

(469) 570-2443

aharwell@secondshiftanalytics.com
Book a time