Job Management Software for Machine Shops

Keep it. WorkGuru handles the job, labour, purchasing and commercial side around it.

Great. The history makes the next quote easier.

One-off jobs can carry their own hours, material and outside costs.

Structure the job with the detail you need so setup and production time do not get mixed together.

Yes, by structuring the job so setup and run are separate tasks and recording time against each. This matters more in machining than almost anywhere else, because setup is where short runs lose money and it is the cost most often buried in an average hourly rate. Once setup is visible separately you can see the real economics of a fifty-off order against a five-off, and you can start quoting repeat work from what it actually took rather than from what you hoped.

Considerably. Repeat work is where job history stops being record-keeping and starts being an estimating tool. When the same part comes round again you have the real setup time, the real cycle time, the material and the outside processing from last time. Project templates let you start the new job from that structure. The gain is not just speed of quoting — it is that your quote is anchored to what the job actually took rather than to the number you guessed the first time and have been re-using ever since.

Yes. Work Areas can represent individual machines, cells or sections of the shop, and work is scheduled against them. For a machine shop this is usually the difference between a plausible delivery promise and an optimistic one, because the constraint is rarely the shop as a whole — it is the one machine that can hold the tolerance. Seeing the queue on that machine specifically is what tells you whether next Thursday is real.

As purchases against the job. Outside work is bought work, and keeping it on the project preserves both the cost and the elapsed time. Elapsed time is the part machine shops underestimate: a part that leaves the building for heat treatment is gone for a week, and if that is not visible in the schedule the promised date was never achievable. Recording it as a project purchase keeps both facts attached to the job.

Material bought for a specific job goes on a project purchase; material you hold goes through inventory and is issued to jobs. Where machining gets awkward is remnant management — the half-bar left over that is genuinely worth something. WorkGuru will track what you issue, but it does not model remnants as a distinct class of stock on its own.

Yes. Costs accumulate against the job as time is recorded and purchases are raised, so you are comparing the live position against the allowance rather than waiting for the post-mortem. On short-run work this is often academic — the job is done before anyone looks. On a long run it is the whole point, because the second setup going badly is a signal you can still act on.

No. CAM decides how the part is cut and machine monitoring tells you what the spindle is doing. WorkGuru does neither. It runs the commercial job around them: the quote, the order, the labour, the purchasing, the outside processing and the cost. If you already have good machine-level data, the value here is connecting it to the commercial outcome — knowing not just that the machine ran for six hours, but that the job it was running lost money.

You can keep inspection records, reports and certificates with the job as documents, and structure inspection as a task so the time is recorded. What WorkGuru does not provide is a quality management module with formal ITP workflows, non-conformance tracking and controlled-document revision. Shops with AS9100 or similar obligations generally keep a dedicated quality system and use WorkGuru for the commercial and operational side.

Record the change on the job. Revised drawings attach to the project, and the extra setup, scrapped parts and additional material go on as they occur. Drawing revisions mid-run are one of the most expensive things that happens in a machine shop and one of the least frequently recovered, usually because by invoicing time nobody can reconstruct what the change actually cost. Capturing it while it happens is what makes recovery possible.

No. WorkGuru handles the operational job — quoting, scheduling, labour, purchasing and job costing — and connects through to accounting for invoices and bills. The practical benefit for a machine shop is that your cost-per-hour stops being a figure someone calculated in a spreadsheet three years ago, because you have real hours against real jobs to derive it from. That figure drives every quote you issue, and in most shops it was set once, by someone who has since left, using an occupancy assumption that has not been true for years. An overstated rate loses you work you should have won; an understated one wins you work you should have refused. Neither failure is visible in the accounts, because the accounts only ever show the blended result of both.