Machine shop and fabricator operations audit The drawing changed. The price didn’t. We find where the money leaks.
New revs run at the old price, terms that stretch past the invoice, quotes with no recorded outcome. In two weeks, from the shop’s own records, we put a monthly dollar figure on each one.
- Fixed fee
- $4,500
- Length
- Two weeks
- Access to records
- Read-only
For machine shops and fabricators at $1M a year and up.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.After hours? Book the call online: one form, no calendar
Sound familiar?
What machine shop owners say about the money they can’t find.
01
Customers who stretch the terms
The invoice says one set of terms and the check arrives weeks later. Chasing it on a schedule is nobody’s job, so the shop ends up as the customer’s bank.
02
A new rev at the old price
The drawing changes with no alert, the floor builds what the print says, and re-pricing the change is nobody’s job. The cost gets eaten to keep the customer.
03
Lot charges and incidentals left off the quote
Heat treat, plating and minimum lot charges come in after the quote, and the small incidentals add up on a job priced without them.
04
More RFQs than time to quote
Prints arrive faster than the estimator can turn them, and buyers want a price in hours. Which RFQs wait, and for how long, is on no list.
05
Quotes with no recorded outcome
Quotes go out and some get missed in the volume. Won, lost and no decision are never written down, so the hit rate is anyone’s guess.
06
Job cost shot from the hip
Quoted hours and actual hours never meet, so nobody can say which part numbers made money and which ones paid for the rest.
Paraphrased from public owner forum threads and trade-press interviews — not from our clients.
None of this is fixed by bringing in more business. Each leak sits in work already on the books.
Where it stalls
From the first call to the cleared payment: where the money stalls.
- RFQ
- Hand-off 01 to Quote
- Hand-off 02 to PO
- Hand-off 03 to Job
- Hand-off 04 to Invoice
- Hand-off 05 to Paid
- Hand-off 06 to Margin
- Hand-off 02 · Quote → PO
Quotes with no follow-up date and no recorded win, loss or no decision.
- Hand-off 03 · PO → Job
New revs, lot charges and outside processing run at the price on the original PO.
- Hand-off 05 · Invoice → Paid
Invoices past terms with customers who pay late as a habit.
- Hand-off 06 · Paid → Margin
Quoted hours never compared with actual hours, part number by part number.
Before any new software
Large companies are spending heavily on AI. Few can show what it returned.
7%
of 2,145 senior leaders at companies with $100M+ in revenue reported having established a return on AI — while planning to spend an average of $188 million each on it.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Those are companies with their own IT departments and budgets. A smaller business that buys a tool on a hunch has less room for the same mistake.
Leaders with strong visibility into costs were five times as likely to report a return on AI (15% against 3%). The same release adds that without clear ownership, decisions fragment and impact gets harder to track.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Free · two taps · no email
Check one hand-off yourself, right now.
Three questions, from your own records
Of the quotes sent in the last ninety days that are still Open, how many have a follow-up date on someone’s calendar?
When a customer sends a new revision mid-run, who checks whether the price still covers it, and where is that check recorded?
How many shipped jobs are waiting on certs or a portal upload before they can be invoiced, and how old is the oldest one?
If an answer takes digging, note where the record lives. That is where the Review starts.
Free self-check · two taps · no email
Hand-off 2 of 6 · Quote → Contract
Choose the answer that sounds like your business.
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
How it runs
Two weeks, $4,500, one finding you can act on.
Day 0
A 20-minute call
Fit, not yet, or not us. No deck, no payment.
Days 1–14
We read the records
Read-only exports from the systems you already run. Nothing switched off, nothing to install.
Day 14
The findings, in writing
Each leak with a monthly dollar figure, the order to fix them in, and the first fix to start the next morning — the shop’s to keep whatever the owner decides.
$2,250 to begin, the balance when the report arrives. The fee does not change with what the Review finds, and the written report is yours to keep.
What we price
Each leak gets a monthly dollar figure.
RFQs quoted and never followed up: how many, at what value, and which buyers stopped sending prints afterward
Engineering changes and revisions run at the price of the old drawing, and second operations or outside processing (plating, heat treat) missing from the quote
Setups, scrap and rework on repeat part numbers that the quote never carried, read from job costing against the quoted hours
Shipped jobs not yet invoiced while certs, first-article reports or a customer-portal upload are outstanding
Invoices past terms with customers who pay late as a habit, and expedite or tooling charges never billed
Who runs it
Small on purpose. Senior on purpose.
A team with ten-plus years in strategic consulting and business-process automation. Before Lumina, our people built and ran revenue operations inside a Fortune 500 US financial institution.
Tamara Stepanyan, founder
No client case studies yet — we would rather tell you that than invent one.
Before you call
Questions machine shop owners ask first.
We already run an ERP. Doesn’t it show which quotes we lost?
It shows what someone entered. Quotes answered straight from the inbox, revisions accepted by email and certs waiting on a desk never reach the ERP as events. We read the quote log, the RFQ inbox, job costing and the invoices against each other and price the gaps. If your reports already answer our three questions, the free 20-minute call will make that obvious.
Do you need our drawings or customer part data?
No. We read counts, dates, part numbers, quoted and actual hours and invoice amounts. Prints, CAM files and anything under a customer’s ITAR, CUI or NDA terms stay where they are. If a customer contract restricts even that, we work from de-identified exports, and the shop decides what it shares.
Our estimator is the bottleneck. Will this take his time?
Very little. The Review runs on read-only access and a kickoff call; nobody stops quoting or programming for the two weeks. The finding usually names where the estimator’s time goes, which is the point.
What do we get at the end?
A findings document with a monthly dollar figure on each leak the records can show, and a fix list ordered by what the numbers justify. The written documents stay with the shop whatever it decides next.
Related reading
In depth
The long version, for an owner who wants the detail.
Job shops and fabricators where the owner still sees every quote
The Review is built for contract machine shops and metal fabricators doing about $1 million a year and up, with a separate estimator or office manager between the RFQ and the floor. The Census Bureau counted 7,344 machine shops with 2022 receipts of $1 million or more, out of 17,130 employer firms in NAICS 332710, and 3,451 of them sat between $2.5 million and $25 million. Fabricated structural metal (NAICS 332312) had 2,098 such firms out of 3,097, and sheet metal work (NAICS 332322) had 2,758 out of 4,250.
Those counts size the field. They say nothing about any one shop’s leaks, which only its own records can show.
Where a job shop’s money slows down
Each step below hands the order to a different person or system. The Review counts what slips at each one.
RFQ to quote: the estimator, the inbox and the quote log
Quote to purchase order: the follow-up nobody owns
Purchase order to traveler: revisions, added operations and outside processing
Traveler to shipment: setups, scrap and rework against the quoted hours
Shipment to invoice: certs, first-article reports and customer portals
Invoice to payment: terms, habitual late payers and unbilled tooling or expedite charges
Where automation and AI can help once the leak is measured
Tools come after the numbers, and only where a leak is large enough to justify them. Each one leaves the decision with a person.
Quote follow-up: a scheduled reminder for every Open quote, drafted from the quote log for the estimator to send or skip
Revision check: a flag when an incoming drawing revision changes tolerances, operations or material, so pricing is reviewed before the floor runs it
Closeout: a checklist that holds the shipment record until certs and inspection reports are attached, then releases the invoice
AI-assisted reading of RFQ packages to pull part counts, materials and requested dates into the quote log; the estimator still prices every line
The numbers that show whether the fixes hold
We do not promise a result. These are the measures the findings are written in, so the shop can track them after the Review.
Quote follow-up rate and win rate, by customer and by estimator
Days from shipment to invoice
Quoted hours against actual hours on repeat part numbers
Share of revisions re-priced before production
Days sales outstanding and invoices past terms
Two weeks, read-only, then a written fix list
Week one is a kickoff call and read-only access to the ERP, quote log, shipping records and accounting. Week two is the count, priced in monthly dollars. The readout delivers the findings and a fix list in the order the numbers justify. Building any fix is a separate decision, scoped after the Review.
Sources
The next step
Tell us what isn’t getting followed up. We’ll tell you if we can help.
- Send the form beside this. A person reads it, not a bot or a ticket queue. We call you back the same business day.
- 20-minute call: fit, not yet, or not us.
- If it fits: the Revenue Review, $4,500 flat, two weeks.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.