Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Manufacturing software in Milwaukee.
Custom systems for Milwaukee machine shops, foundries and controls makers. The metro has the highest concentration of manufacturing jobs in the country. 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 $1,037.
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 that costs here, in a metro that already runs lean.
- $36.37an hour, median. A production supervisor in the Milwaukee-Waukesha metro area. US dollars.
- $1,037a week. 28.5 hours times $36.37.
- $53,924a year. $1,037 a week times 52.
Fifty three thousand dollars a year that nobody is selling.
That shop had 90 people. You are carrying the work of more with fewer, so your number is your own and the walkthrough finds it.
Your town
Yes, this is your town, and we know what fifty thousand jobs feels like
Metro Milwaukee has the highest concentration of manufacturing jobs in the country, and a density of advanced manufacturing jobs nearly twice the national average (Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, 30 Sep 2024, read 2 Oct 2026).
And the hard number on the same page: about 114,000 people work in manufacturing in the four county metro, down from about 165,000 in 2000 (same article).
Fifty thousand jobs went and the work did not. Whoever is left is carrying it, and most of them are carrying it in their head and in one spreadsheet.
The work
What we build
Fifty thousand manufacturing jobs went and the work did not. These four are about carrying it with who is left.
What he knows about that machine, written down.
The setup is not in the manual. It is in the man who has run it for twenty two years, and in a metro that lost this many people that is the asset to protect first.
One structure per part, and it is current.
Multi level bills of material with revisions, routings, standard cost, where used and change history, for foundry work, hydraulics and controls alike.
Capacity by machine and by crew.
Sequencing, due dates and what if, so a lean crew is scheduled on what it can actually do rather than what the board says.
The hour it costs when it is down.
Every asset catalogued with its parts, its vendors and its downtime cost, because with fewer people a stoppage costs more than it used to.
You keep the system you already run. We build the parts it never covered.
Money toward it
Your own budget, most likely
Your own budget, most likely. We would rather say it now than let you find out later.
Wisconsin’s centre in the federal NIST MEP network is the UW-Stout Manufacturing Outreach Center, working with small and mid sized manufacturers across the state (NIST centre list, read 2 Oct 2026).
A metro that lost fifty thousand manufacturing jobs does not spend on faith. So every item on the map carries a price and a payback position, and you decide where to stop.
What we hear
What usually stops people
“We are doing the same work with fewer people.”
That is the whole metro, and it is the argument for this. The map finds the hours nobody is selling and prices them, before anybody talks about software.
“We have run this way for forty years.”
And half of what we do is fixing the flow before anybody writes a line of code. Automating a broken process just makes it break faster.
“Our best man retires in two years.”
Then you have two years to get what is in his head onto something a person can read. Most shops start it too late.
“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 priced, in the order it pays back. Yours either way.
Straight answers
- You are in Canada. Does that matter?
- No. We are in Kelowna, British Columbia, two hours behind Milwaukee. Most work is remote and we fly when the job needs it.
- We are a foundry, not an assembly shop. Does that fit?
- Yes. Ten to five hundred people, in anything that builds, moves, fixes or processes real things.
- What does it cost my people?
- A couple of hours for the walkthrough, then a short check-in each week while it is built.
- Who owns the system?
- We keep the code. You keep your data and your freedom to leave. Thirty day exit, no penalty.