UPFab, a 35-person custom steel-fabrication shop in Michigan, replaced spreadsheets and guess-work with EZIIL’s flexible, modular job-shop platform, gaining real-time schedule visibility and the confidence to price, plan, and deliver more profitable projects without overloading the shop floor.
UPFAB
- Industry and specialities: Miscellaneous/industrial steel fabrication and custom job-shop work such as access platforms, ladders, stairs, and structural packages for plant expansions
- Headcount: 35 full-time-equivalent employees
- Revenue: US $5–7 million
- Location: Michigan, USA
- Toolchain: SolidWorks and Tekla Structures CAD
- Website: https://upfab.com/
Before EZIIL
The team used to manage workload with stand-alone Google Sheets and ad-hoc forms. Spreadsheets offered limited version control, error-prone data entry, and no real-time shop visibility, issues widely documented in manufacturing circles .
The single “source of truth” was the shop supervisor’s memory; project managers routinely over-committed capacity, leading to:
- Unbalanced loading – feast-or-famine periods where five projects might be due the same week.
- Costly last-minute calls to contractors when steel wouldn’t arrive on site, sometimes triggering back-charges for idle field crews.
- Opaque forecasting – pricing was conservative for fear of gaps, or too low when the shop was unknowingly full, eroding margin.
The owners began searching for a purpose-built job-shop platform. Packages tightly coupled to one CAD system (e.g. Tekla PowerFab) still required part-by-part data entry, impossible on thousand-line custom jobs.
They needed:
- Bulk import from multiple CAD sources.
- A visual master schedule that updated in seconds, not days.
- A modular path: start with scheduling, add inventory and shop-floor data capture later.
- SaaS pricing they could grow into, instead of a five-figure upfront licence.
Why did they choose EZIIL?
- Job-shop reality – If you build one-off steel packages, you need flexibility, not rigid BOM entry.
- Start small, scale fast – Pay only for what you need today. Enable inventory, purchasing, or time-tracking when the team is ready.
- See the whole shop – A live, interactive Gantt turns tribal knowledge into a transparent production plan.
Adapting EZIIL
Fast, phased rollout
Because EZIIL is modular, the team deployed only the Planning module first – mirroring best-practice advice that small shops adopt ERP in digestible steps to avoid implementation fatigue. Uploading existing CSV estimates took minutes, and common customers, operations, and technologies became drop-down lists instead of free-text typing.
Master-View Gantt = single source of truth
EZIIL’s Master View renders every project as an interactive Gantt chart. Visual scheduling is proven to boost shop-floor communication, highlight bottlenecks early, and cut rescheduling effort. For the first time, all seven project managers—and even accounting—see live capacity on one screen.
Change management
With only office users on phase 1, adoption was painless: no one complained, and even less-tech-savvy staff could drag-and-drop dates within a day. Shop-floor tablets will follow once material tracking goes live later this year.
The outcome (first-quarter results)
| Challenge | Life before EZIIL | Life after EZIIL | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schedule visibility | Weekly status meetings + “seat-of-pants” decisions | Real-time Gantt with forward load 3-6 months | Shop can commit with confidence and avoid overloads |
| Quote accuracy & margin | Prices often low to win work, risking clashes | PMs see future capacity and price premium work accordingly | Higher hit rate on profitable jobs; early quotes up ≈15% |
| Customer communication | Reactive calls if deadlines slipped | PMs identify risk weeks out and negotiate proactively | Fewer late-delivery penalties, stronger CX |
| Data entry effort | Thousands of parts keyed manually | Bulk CAD import in minutes | Hours saved per project; focus on value-add |
whats next?
Management expects the visibility gains alone to finance the subscription within the first year, and is preparing to add material, inventory, and shop-data capture modules as the next step.
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