Fabrication & Machine Shop Software
If you don't know exactly how long the work takes, you don't know what it costs — you're just hoping the price covers it.
Machine and fabrication shops live and die by time. Whether you're running the same operation across a hundred parts or building a one-off that's never existed before, the question is the same: how long does this actually take, and are you charging enough for it? MSA is built to answer that with data instead of gut feel.
Track time on every task
Everything here starts with real numbers. Your team tracks time against each individual task as it's worked — every setup, every operation, every hour at the mill or the bench logged against the job it belongs to. That's the raw data the rest of this is built on, and it's the whole difference between knowing your costs and guessing at them.
Tag every project and part with QR codes
A machine or fab floor is full of parts that look alike and jobs in a dozen states of done. Print a QR code for each project and part and tag it as it comes in. Anyone can scan it to pull up the job, the specs, and where it stands — so the raw stock, the in-process part, and the finished piece are never a guessing game on a crowded bench.
Move work through your process with zones
Set up zones for the stages of your process — programming, setup, machining, deburr, inspection, ship — and move each job across the board as it progresses. Scan a part into the next zone and the job moves with it, giving you a live, pull-based view of the whole floor without anyone updating a status by hand.
For machine shops: price repeated work from real data, not a guess
This is where the time tracking pays off. Every time you run a repeated operation, MSA keeps the history — and when you pull up that task's history, it doesn't just hand you an average. It shows the average actual time, your book time, and the 1-sigma and 2-sigma distribution of your real runs — so you can see how tightly the work clusters and how bad the outliers get. Price to the average and you bleed on the hard ones; price with the full distribution in front of you and you set a rate that actually covers the work, run after run. The more parts you make, the sharper that number gets.
For custom fab: take the guesswork out of one-off work
Custom fabrication is the hardest thing in the shop to quote, because no two jobs are the same. Building your tasks as hourly work lets you stop pretending you can flat-rate a one-off — you track the actual hours it takes to build the thing and bill for the work you truly did. And over time, even your one-offs start to rhyme: the history gives you a real starting point for the next quote instead of a number pulled out of the air.
Machine and fab work rewards precision, and so does MSA. Time on every task, QR tracking on every part, and statistical history on every repeated process — this is software that treats time like the raw material it is on your floor.