If you’re running a small metal fabrication shop, you know the chaos that comes from juggling Excel sheets, whiteboards, phone calls, and paper notes just to stay on top of jobs. That’s exactly the pain EZIIL Starter set out to solve, and now it’s even better.
With the latest release, EZIIL Starter becomes your comprehensive production brain for your steel projects, with added real-time project profit dashboard, OTD tracking, advanced production planning and scheduling, filtering and much more.
Here’s a look at the major new features that will change project management for small custom steel fabrication shops.
What’s New in EZIIL Starter
Designed for more profitability and fewer surprises, one of the most impactful aspects of EZIIL Starter is the emphasis on at-a-glance real-time updates. In a small fabrication shop, lack of timely information can be detrimental. You might discover days late that you’ve already blown past the hours budgeted for a phase or a critical task is behind schedule. EZIIL Starter eliminates that uncertainty by giving you a live window into your operations and profitability at all times.
EZIIL Starter’s Projects dashboard provides a high-level, color-coded overview of all active projects and their stages. At a glance, executives, planners and managers can see each project’s timeline, profitability, current status of tasks, and workload distribution across the shop. This real-time “big picture” means no more surprises. You always know exactly what’s on track and what might need attention.
1. 📈 Real-time Project Profit Overview and Forecasting
Real-time margin tracking. See exactly where profits are coming from, or leaking out, long before invoicing.
How does it work: You can now set a total sales price for the project or assign sales prices per stage (this is perfect for jobs that are billed in phases). EZIIL then calculates expected profit automatically in real-time based on your planned hours and internal labor rate. Expected profit is calculated based on hours x cost vs revenue. EZIIL shows you visually when profit is above expectations (green), on target (black), or below target (red).
This gives you real-time visibility on whether your margin expectations are being met.
Why it matters: Most small fabricators track profitability manually (if at all) and don’t know how much money they’re really making until the job is done. With this release, you can instantly spot spot financial issues and see which jobs are on track, which are bleeding margin, and adjust accordingly.
Project Profit Overview Helps You:
- See which stages are eating margin and intervene on low-margin jobs in real time
- Choose between full-project pricing or stage-by-stage billing, depending on your customer contracts
- Stop guessing if a job is profitable while it’s still in progress
- Improve quoting accuracy over time by comparing estimated vs actual profit
2. 📅 On-Time Delivery (OTD) Tracking at a Glance
Visual indicators for on-time, late, and ongoing project progress status. Quickly view which departments, tasks and stages hit or missed deadlines and get a clear visual status for every task.
How does it work: Each stage of the project displays a department-level breakdown of whether the task was completed on time. Color indicators make it clear how far each task is at this moment. So, if a fabrication step is delayed, or a welding task wasn’t completed when it should’ve been, you’ll see it immediately in red. This view is automatically generated and updated as stages progress.
Why it matters: In small custom steel shops, every day counts. Even a one-day delay in fabrication or delivery can throw off your whole production chain. This feature brings accountability and transparency to the shop floor, without extra data entry. Now you don’t need to dig through notes to see what’s late, EZIIL flags it immediately.
Real-Time OTD Tracking Helps You:
- Instantly spot where a job is falling behind
- Benchmark and improve internal lead times
- Proactively manage deadlines before they snowball
- See which departments are consistently on time or late
- Use data to improve team performance or renegotiate timelines with clients
- Increase confidence when promising delivery dates to customers
- Prevent finger-pointing by using shared data
3. 🗂 Smarter Filtering To Help You Focus on What Matters
Customize your EZIIL Projects dashboard with filters for project status, project manager, and more.
How it works: You can now filter by “active” jobs, archive old ones, and even drill down by project manager. EZIIL remembers your settings, so when you return, you’re exactly where you left off. You can easily create your own filters, that match your personal workflow and set up.
Why it matters: For a 20-person shop juggling 30+ active jobs, this means less time scrolling and more time managing. A small upgrade with huge everyday impact.
Smart Filtering Helps You:
- Always land on the right project view when logging in
- Focus only on the projects that matter
- Avoid clutter from archived or completed work
4. 🕒 Resource Planning and Scheduling View with Alerts and Progress Tracking
A real-time overview of scheduling health and workload balancing across the shop.
How it works: EZIIL planning and scheduling view shows whether each task is correctly scheduled, partially filled, or misaligned (for example, final steps scheduled after deadlines). Tasks are marked blue if fully planned, grey if partially planned, and red if something is off. You’ll also get a bird’s eye overview of the progress health, indicated by blue (finished on time), green (ahead of scheduled deadline) or red (behind scheduled deadline) progress bars for each project and its stages.
All of this automatically feeds into your business’ capacity across departments, so you’ll know exactly how many hours and resources you’ve already planned vs how much is still available.
Why it matters: Without proper planning, even a small slip can trigger delays down the line. This feature lets you see instantly where you’ve overloaded/underused capacity or have scheduling clashes, and course-correct before mistakes hit production. Plus, it gives you confidence when quoting timelines to clients or accepting last-minute jobs.
A clear breakdown of responsibilities and process flow per job improves shop-floor visibility, ensures process consistency and helps new hires or contractors understand what’s needed at each stage.
Resource Planning and Scheduling Help You:
- Spot and fix scheduling issues before they cause production delays
- Balance workloads across departments to avoid overloading/burnout or idle time
- Immediately see if all steps have been properly scheduled (and where gaps exist)
- Use color-coded planning health to keep teams aligned and account
- Define workflows clearly for every stage
- Standardize processes across projects
- Help new hires or freelancers know what’s expected
5. ✍️ Manual Progress Adjustments with Auto-Recalculation
Manually override and adjust progress % to keep job statuses accurate and up-to-date picture, even if time entries lag behind. EZIIL’s system automatically recalculates profitability and timeline.
How it works: For example, if a task was marked as 10% (maybe the shop floor hours hadn’t been logged correctly) but it’s actually 40%, you can just correct it manually. EZIIL automatically updates the dashboard with recalculated timeline, status and profit.
Why it matters: Projects can change fast. This feature keeps the system flexible and reflective of reality. Your data will always be accurate even when things change last minute or get reported late.
Manual Progress Adjustments Help You:
- Stay accurate without chasing every time log
- Quickly react to changes without breaking your flow
- Keep financials and status aligned with actual progress
6.💡 Tooltips That Teach While You Work
EZIIL dashboard features hover-over tooltips that explain in-app actions and your project’s key information and data at a glance.
How it works: Hover over any field and EZIIL explains what it is, where the data comes from, and how it’s calculated.
Why it matters: Your team doesn’t have to second-guess what any number means. Tooltips reduce learning curve, onboarding time and eliminate misinterpretation.
Tooltips Help You:
- Train faster with fewer errors
- Trust the data you’re seeing
- Build confidence across your team
EZIIL Starter Benefits for Small Custom Steel Fabricators
Let’s translate those solutions into the tangible benefits executive decision-makers and ops leads can expect from EZIIL Starter. By introducing the above capabilities, EZIIL Starter delivers several key improvements and measurable gains:
✅ Higher Profitability Per Project: By tracking budgets vs. actuals in real time, EZIIL Starter helps prevent profit leakages. Issues like untracked overtime, overspending on a phase, or delays (which incur penalties or extra costs) can be caught early and mitigated. Better forecasting and resource allocation, combined with timely intervention, mean projects are more likely to stay within budget, directly improving profit margins. One EZIIL user put it simply: “Don’t let outdated tools hold your production and profitability back”. With EZIIL Starter, you gain control to avoid the common pitfalls that eat into profits. You can calculate your personal EZIIL Starter return on investment (ROI) here.
✅ Single Source of Truth: All project information, from estimates to project documentation to time logs, is stored in one place. This eliminates data silos and ensures everyone is always working off the latest information. No more costly mistakes due to someone referencing an outdated spreadsheet or missing an email update. The centralized system boosts transparency and trust in the data.
✅ Real-Time Operational Visibility: With live dashboards and progress updates, you gain full visibility into your operations at any moment. You can see exactly which projects are on track and which might need intervention. This visibility means fewer surprises and the ability to manage by facts, not guesses. Managers can allocate resources or assist teams before a small delay becomes a big problem.
✅ Improved Scheduling and On-Time Delivery (OTD): EZIIL Starter’s planning tools enable smart scheduling based on actual capacity. By detecting bottlenecks early and allowing teams to adjust timelines collaboratively, it ensures projects flow smoothly and deadlines are met. Shops can confidently promise delivery dates and hit them, improving customer satisfaction and reputation. The visual scheduler also helps even out workloads, so your shop isn’t overwhelmed one week and idle the next, leading to more consistent productivity.
✅ Streamlined Reporting and Accountability: EZIIL Starter automatically captures progress and time data, giving you instant reports on project status, labor hours, and more. This not only saves managers hours of administrative work each week, but also creates a culture of accountability. Team members know their work is being tracked and measured in a fair, transparent way. For example, you can pull a report on how many hours the welding department logged this month versus what was planned, and use that to improve future planning or provide support where needed. Everything is documented, which is also a big plus for compliance or client reporting requirements.
✅ Scalable and Flexible Growth: Perhaps one of the most appreciated benefits is how EZIIL Starter grows with you. It’s designed so you can start with core features and add more as needed, without a costly re-investment or reimplementation. This modular approach means small shops can begin with the basics (say, project scheduling and time tracking) and later introduce advanced modules like inventory management or integrations as their needs evolve.
EZIIL’s monthly subscription model makes it a low-risk investment. You’re not locked into a huge upfront fee. The flexibility to implement at your own pace and even cancel if it’s not working (though we think you’ll love it) gives cautious business owners peace of mind. And because EZIIL Starter is cloud-based and updated regularly, you always have the latest features and improvements without any heavy lifting on your part.
✅ Faster Setup and User-Friendly Design: Unlike large systems that can take months to deploy, EZIIL Starter can be up and running in a matter of weeks (or even days for a basic setup). It’s intentionally designed to be intuitive and custom-steel-fabrication-specific, so your team doesn’t need extensive training to start using it. In fact, ease of adoption was a key design principle.
As one beta user reported, “Other tools forced us to enter every single bit of information for each project, which would take weeks, but EZIIL lets us get set up in minutes. That’s a huge time-saver for us.”. Your team can gradually move their processes into EZIIL Starter, one step at a time, without feeling overwhelmed. The interface uses familiar concepts and terms from fabrication projects, which shortens the learning curve. This means, you will start seeing benefits (like time saved and fewer errors) almost immediately.
To sum it up, EZIIL Starter transforms a shop’s operations from reactive chaos to proactive control. It addresses the root causes of delays, overruns, and inefficiencies with a solution that is practical, measurably effective, and tailored to the way custom metal fabricators work. You’ll spend less time fighting fires and more time growing the business.
Who Is EZIIL Starter Built For?
EZIIL Starter was specifically created for small custom steel fabricators to be the first step toward smarter fabrication management, helping shops transition smoothly from their jumble of Excel files and paper notes into a centralized, real-time digital workflow. Unlike full-blown ERP solutions that can overwhelm a 20-person job shop with features they don’t need, EZIIL Starter focuses on the essentials: planning, tracking, and coordinating custom fabrication projects, without the bloat or huge cost.
EZIIL Starter’s customers are steel fabrication shops, building unique or custom steel products (structural components, bespoke metalworks, etc) rather than mass production. Often, they’re businesses that have grown to a point where the old manual methods just aren’t sustainable for the volume and complexity of work they have now.
Perhaps you’ve been running the business via spreadsheets and phone calls, and you know things slip through the cracks but a full ERP system feels like overkill. Or maybe you’ve even tried an ERP/MRP before, only to abandon it because it was too complex or expensive for your needs.
EZIIL Starter is the bridge between where you are now and a fully digitized operation. It gives you the critical functions you need without the headache. As an MES tailored for small shops, it focuses on exactly those pain points you deal with daily (scheduling, tracking, communication, basic inventory) and skips the bloated extras you don’t need.
To put it plainly, EZIIL Starter is for fabricators who are moving off of disconnected tools like Excel or paper, and who want to improve their project efficiency, take on more or bigger contracts, and get better visibility without a drawn-out, risky software implementation. It’s for the team that values data-driven decision making and wants to replace guesswork with accurate information. And it’s for leaders who need to keep their finger on the pulse of the shop floor, even when they’re not physically present by the machines.
Ready to Transform Your Custom Steel Fabrication Shop?
The new EZIIL Starter is out now!
Want to be among the first users to see it in action? Sign up here for a free (pre-populated) demo account and explore today! No credit card needed.
To celebrate this launch, we’re offering 20% off all annual plans until August 31st.
If you’ve been stuck on Excel or frustrated by ERP systems that are too much, now’s the perfect time to switch.
