Productized stack — mid-market manufacturers

Know what every order actually made you.

For manufacturers whose data lives in a real ERP nobody has time to mine — or in spreadsheets and three people's heads. Cost sheets that update themselves, quotes out same-day, orders answered around the clock, and a brief that tells you what moved. No ERP migration, no ERP required. No model ever sets a price.

01The numbers

What this class of system does.

3× faster

Shops that moved from spreadsheet quoting to automated quoting respond to RFQs three times faster — and the first credible quote is first in line for the order.

Source — Modern Machine Shop
1.9M unfilled

Projected unfilled U.S. manufacturing jobs by 2033. The capacity you can't hire is capacity you have to build.

Source — Deloitte & The Manufacturing Institute
~60%

In an Institute of Management Accountants survey, nearly 60% of manufacturers said inaccurate cost data has directly driven bad pricing decisions. Quoting off last year's costs isn't conservative — it's a coin flip.

Source — Institute of Management Accountants
ERP & accountingQuickBooks · Acumatica · SYSPRO · NetSuite · Fishbowl · Katana · JobBOSS
Sales, ops & commercePipedrive · HubSpot · Shopify · Airtable · your spreadsheets
02What we ship for manufacturers

Automate the steps. Protect the judgment.

Rolling up a cost sheet is a step. Deciding the margin you'll take is a thought. Logging a received lot is a step. Releasing the order is a thought. We automate the steps. Pricing, quality, and release stay human — always.

01 / 04 · Quoting — the quote desk

Same-day quotes, priced off costs that are actually current.

RFQs and reorder requests read on arrival, matched against your quote history and build sheets, and drafted into a priced quote for your review. When you win the order, the job drafts itself into your ERP from the closest past build — your senior lead reviews, corrects, and approves. The model drafts. You price.

  • RFQ intake reader — email and PDF in, a structured quote record out, matched to the nearest past job.
  • Cost sheet keeper — supplier invoices reprice your materials and BOMs the day they land.
  • Requote calendar — which accounts to reprice, when, and by how much your costs actually moved.
02 / 04 · Orders & parts — the order desk

Every order, part, and status question — answered around the clock.

Customers calling about orders, parts, and fitment don't keep your shop hours. The order desk answers email and chat in your company's voice — checks stock, takes the order, answers "which one fits," and logs everything to your systems. Anything it shouldn't answer routes to your counter with full context.

  • Parts & fitment answers — it knows your catalog, the cross-references, and what shipped on every past order.
  • Order intake & status — takes the order, confirms stock and lead time, answers "where is it" without a callback.
  • Doc runner — COAs, spec sheets, W-9s, invoice copies — the paperwork requests that eat your office's day.
03 / 04 · Margin & visibility — the margin engine

Margin by order, by SKU, by account. Not by gut.

Profitability that assembles itself from your invoices, your jobs, and your cost sheets — which products carry the shop, which accounts quietly stopped paying for themselves, and a budget-vs-actual that shows up monthly, then weekly, then live. Deterministic math on your own numbers. No model invents a cost.

  • Job costing — actual cost per order reconciled against what you quoted, variance explained, not just flagged.
  • BvA assembler — budget-vs-actual that builds itself, variances routed to the manager who owns the line.
  • Commodity watch — price moves mapped to the SKUs they expose, with vendor RFQs drafted in your voice.
04 / 04 · Owner visibility — the Brief

The plant reports to you now.

The daily operator brief, plus the weekly roll-up: what shipped, what slipped, what's short for next week's schedule, which receivables aged, and the decisions queued with context attached. It doesn't schedule your plant — it makes sure you're never the last to know. And when the call comes, the records hold up: every order traced to its inputs, every build to its components.

  • Daily operator brief — the 6:15 AM read: orders, margin flags, supply risks, and the decision queue.
  • Open order watch — every order against its ship date, shortages flagged with lead time to spare.
  • Records & trace — receiving to build to shipment on one thread. Warranty call or mock recall: minutes, not days.
03Why Vector 48

Operators, not consultants. We ship what we recommend.

There's no shortage of platforms that want to be your next system. There's no shortage of consultancies that'll write you a deck. What's been missing is operators who can do both — and stand behind it.

Your existing stack

QuickBooks — hosted desktop included — Acumatica, SYSPRO, NetSuite, and yes, your spreadsheets. Better answers in the tools your team already uses. No ERP migration. The systems running your plant stay running.

Run continuously

Not a software install, not a one-time deliverable. We build the systems, run them with you, and keep them sharp as the AI stack moves. The same operators who ship the work stay accountable for it.

Built for mid-market plants

$10M to $100M-plus, where the ERP is real but your most senior people are still the integration layer above it. Your IT team keeps their systems and holds the keys — we build on top, in your tenant, and don't touch what runs.

04Common questions

Before you book the call.

Does the AI set our prices?

No — and it never will. It drafts quotes, does the math, and flags the drift. A human signs every price and every release. That's a design principle, not a settings toggle: AI never makes irreversible business decisions in our builds.

We're on QuickBooks Enterprise on a hosted remote desktop. Can you even connect?

Yes. It's a common setup at this size, and we design for it. Where a clean API doesn't exist, we build reliable extraction that never touches your books' integrity — read where we can, verify everything, write nothing without rules.

Do we need a new ERP first?

No. The whole model is building the intelligence layer on what you run today. Already on Acumatica, SYSPRO, or NetSuite? Even better — everything we build sits on top of it and makes it worth more. And if our assessment says a system genuinely needs replacing, we'll tell you straight — but "buy an ERP first" is usually a two-year detour someone else profits from.

Will this make us audit-ready — SQF, FSMA, customer audits?

It builds what those frameworks demand: lot and build records captured once, consumption reconciled, and a trace that runs in minutes instead of days. Your compliance program and your auditor make the certification call — we don't sell certificates. We build records that hold up.

Who has access to our production and customer data?

Your data stays siloed to your environment. We do not train shared models on client data, ever. Full NDA is standard. We can operate in your infrastructure or ours. Your call.

What's a typical engagement size?

Most ongoing engagements run in the $5–12K per month range, depending on the number of systems and which of the four products you run. The Engage phase is fixed-fee and scoped on the discovery call. We'll give you real numbers — not a brochure range — on the call.

What happens when an agent gets something wrong?

Every lane ships with golden sets built from your own best work and a regression suite that reruns on every change, so we know what right looks like before an agent touches a customer. A lane starts supervised and earns autonomy only on measured output against spec — and it steps back down the moment a regression fails. Anything outside its lane escalates to a human with the history attached. Every miss is reviewed weekly and becomes a new test.

A plant-floor read on where AI pays — and where it doesn't.

Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll walk your quoting, your order flow, and your cost sheets — and tell you straight where the margin is hiding and which product pays for itself first. No deck, no sales pitch.