A precision sheet metal fabricator processes about 4,000 parts per day across a 60,000 square foot ISO 9001:2015 certified facility. They serve automotive, medical, agricultural, industrial, and energy customers. Their ERP system, Global Shop, handles inventory, work orders, and production tracking. Their engineering team uses SolidWorks for part design. The two systems didn’t talk to each other.
Every day, someone on the engineering team had to manually connect SolidWorks drawings and 3D models to the matching inventory records in Global Shop. That meant navigating multiple screens, multiple clicks per part, roughly 35 parts per day at about 4 minutes each. That’s over two hours of daily admin work performed by engineers who should be designing parts. Laser machine production data was entered into the ERP by hand. Heat and lot traceability for ISO compliance was tracked manually. Reporting dashboards went stale between manual refreshes.
We didn’t try to replace the ERP. We built a suite of 7+ targeted Python applications that created an integration layer between engineering, the shop floor, and Global Shop. The primary tool: a drawing linker that traverses CAD directories, parses part numbers from SolidWorks filenames, validates against the inventory master, and auto-creates document links. We also built a laser data importer, a heat/lot traceability tool, cache refresh utilities, and a CNC program analyzer. Each tool connects directly to the Pervasive/Zen SQL database and was designed around how the shop floor actually operates.
The automation recaptured over 500 hours per year, with combined savings between $30,000 and $50,000 annually. Engineering staff went back to design work instead of data entry. ISO 9001:2015 traceability runs automatically instead of by hand. Reports stay current without someone manually refreshing them. Data entry errors dropped. The ERP system didn’t change. What changed was how people interact with it.