Chicago, Illinois
Manufacturing software in Chicago.
Custom systems for Chicago area plants, shops and distributors. 400,000 plus manufacturing and logistics workers and $100 billion of output. Free walkthrough.
The work
Four things we built. Different industries, same engineer.
Each one started as a problem somebody said out loud. All four are live: press the button and use the real tool.
Recommissioning a gas plant from twenty-year-old drawings.
The client bought a plant that had been shut down for years. 646 tags, thirteen questions each, before a single part could be bought. We built the system that answers them, tag by tag.
A 60-person fab shop, up for sale, and nothing written down.
The buyers loved the business and could not see how it ran. We interviewed 22 people, pulled out everything they knew, and built the whole operation into one package: flows, procedures, safety, ISO, maintenance, a legacy library. The deal closed.
A supply business that runs itself.
A teeth whitening supplier that sells to salons. One console reads the mail, chases the leads, counts the stock and writes the letters. The owner clicks only to send and to pay.
An end to end water delivery business, run from the truck.
One truck, 150 doors a week. The app asks every customer, builds the run, sends the invoice and takes the payment. The owner drives.
The money
28.5 hours a week. That is $1,048.
We mapped a 90 person fabrication shop. 28.5 hours every week went into work nobody sells. Re-typing a shipping slip into an invoice. Re-typing a quote into a job. Rebuilding the whiteboard schedule (the payback chart on pragmabuild.com/how-it-works).
What those hours cost across this metro, per shop, per week.
- $36.78an hour, median. A production supervisor in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro area. US dollars.
- $1,048a week. 28.5 hours times $36.78.
- $54,496a year. $1,048 a week times 52.
Fifty four thousand dollars a year, spent moving numbers between screens.
That shop had 90 people. Yours is a different size, so we count your hours instead of assuming them.
Your town
Yes, this is your town
The Chicago metro has more than 400,000 manufacturing and logistics workers and over $100 billion of annual manufacturing output, and ranks second among US metros for manufacturing employment diversity (World Business Chicago, read 2 Oct 2026).
Diversity is the point. Robotics, clean energy systems, aerospace, food production and precision engineering sit in the same metro (same page), which means nobody’s shop looks like anybody else’s and no package fits more than a third of it.
Manufacturing and logistics counted together is the other point. Here the plant and the warehouse are one problem, and the system under them usually is not.
The work
What we build
Here the plant and the warehouse are one problem. Most systems under them are not.
Receiving, the bin and the job agree.
One count updated where the product actually moves, with reorder points that fire on their own rather than when somebody notices.
Sequencing you can test before you promise.
Capacity by machine and by crew, due dates and what if, so moving one job shows what it does to the other nine.
One screen, touched on the way past.
A live job state the floor sets itself, so the office can answer a customer without walking the building.
Order to load to invoice, typed once.
Talking to the accounting system you already use, so a shipment and its invoice leave on the same day.
You keep the system you already run. We build the parts it never covered.
Money toward it
This comes out of your own budget
This is normally funded out of your own budget. We say that up front rather than selling you a grant we cannot deliver.
Illinois’s centre in the federal NIST MEP network is the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center, for small and mid sized manufacturers in this state (NIST centre list, read 2 Oct 2026; IMEC). A call there costs nothing.
Your money means the order matters more than the list. The map prices each item and sequences them so the first build pays for the one behind it.
What we hear
What usually stops people
“Nobody sells a package that fits us.”
They do not, and that is the whole reason we exist. Yours gets built around how your people already work.
“Our count is right until somebody pulls a pallet at four on a Friday.”
Exactly. Purchasing orders what the sheet says. The floor says something else.
“We have three plants and none of them do it the same way.”
That is the normal starting point. We map how each one really runs first, then build one thing that fits all three.
“You are in Canada.”
Two hours behind you, and most jobs run remote on a screen share and a phone camera in your operator’s hand. When the job needs boots on the floor, we fly.
Next step
Book a walkthrough.
Free. Thirty minutes. A written map of your operation: every process, the real cost in hours and dollars, what can be automated, in payback order. Yours to keep.
Straight answers
- You are in Canada. Does that matter?
- No. We are in Kelowna, British Columbia, two hours behind Chicago. Most work is remote and we fly when the job needs it.
- Do you do warehouse and distribution too?
- Yes. Plants, shops, yards, fleets and distribution are all on the list, and here they are usually the same problem.
- How big does my shop have to be?
- Ten people to five hundred.
- Who owns the system?
- We keep the code. You keep your data and your freedom to leave. Thirty day exit, no penalty.