I built ShopBoard to run my own plant.
I’m a GM. I ran a $50M machining and assembly plant on a color-coded spreadsheet and a whiteboard until I got tired of finding out about problems at the end of the shift. Today ShopBoard runs our floor every morning.
hello@shopboard.liveI read and answer it myself.
- machining and assembly plant
- $50M
- cells on ShopBoard every morning
- 17
- shifts
- 2
- people
- 150
A spreadsheet that couldn’t say why.
The first version of ShopBoard was something I put together over a weekend to replace a color-coded spreadsheet. The spreadsheet worked, sort of. It tracked our SQDC numbers and showed the day’s status. But it broke every time someone edited the wrong cell, needed manual updates, and couldn’t tell you why a number was red.
The turning point was a quality problem on one of our high-volume cells. We would log it, fix it for a week, and watch it come back. The root cause never got written down anywhere useful, and nobody owned the fix. We tried the same countermeasure three times before someone finally built a proper A3.
That’s when ShopBoard stopped being a scoreboard. The 3C to A3 escalation, scrap tracked by reason code, the coach that checks a 3C against past fixes on the same cell: each one came from a problem on our floor, not from a product roadmap.
Big plants have lean teams. Small plants have a whiteboard.
Large manufacturers have lean departments, MES systems and people whose job is the daily management board. A 50-person job shop has a whiteboard, a clipboard and a supervisor who is also running a machine.
The gap isn’t sophistication. It’s time and money. ShopBoard is built for the supervisor at the cell and the GM looking at the morning numbers, not for an IT department or an ERP consultant. That’s why it is free for your first two cells and priced flat, never per user.
A founder who runs a floor, not a sales team.
I answer every email myself
Usually within one business day. On Professional, the same day. No ticket queue, no account manager.
I'll help you set up your first cell
Tell me how your floor runs and I will help you map the first department, targets and shifts included.
Free stays free
One department, two cells, every core module, no time limit. It is how I would want to try a tool on my own floor.
The site only says what the app does
If it is on this site, you can click it in the app today. When something is not built yet, I say so.
I’ve stood at that whiteboard at 6 AM.
Try ShopBoard on your own floor, or email me first. Either way, you’ll hear back from me.
Or email hello@shopboard.live