Industry // Machine Shops

Your quoting backlog grows every week. Your best estimator is 58.

Bloomfield builds custom AI tools for CNC and precision machine shops. Quoting that pulls from every job you have ever run. Setup knowledge that survives retirement. Scheduling that accounts for what your 5-axis machines are actually doing.

The Problem

Four constraints that cost machine shops real money

These are the bottlenecks we see in every precision shop we walk into. They compound. A slow quote feeds a missed delivery feeds a lost customer, and the root cause is always the same: critical data trapped in places the team cannot reach when they need it.

High-mix quoting that depends on one person

A 200-part-number shop running Mazak and Haas across 3 and 5-axis receives 40 RFQs a week. The estimator opens each drawing, checks material stock, references past jobs from memory, calculates cycle times by hand, and builds the quote in Excel. The whole operation bottlenecks at one desk. Shops that quote in two days win 35% of bids. Shops that take five days win 12%.

Setup knowledge walking out the door

Your senior machinist knows that the Inconel 718 job on the DMG MORI requires a specific fixturing sequence and a feed rate adjustment on the third pass that took six months to dial in. None of that is in the ERP. None of it is in the setup sheet. It lives in a personal notebook and 22 years of muscle memory. When that person retires, the replacement starts from scratch on every setup.

Scheduling across machines with no shared data

The production manager tracks jobs on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, and the ERP. None of them agree. A priority job lands on a 4-axis Okuma that is already 6 hours behind on a different order. Nobody finds out until second shift. Scheduling by gut feel works until it costs you a delivery date.

Equipment utilization you cannot measure

A 5-axis Hermle costs $800,000. Most shops have no idea whether it runs at 62% or 78% utilization. They know when it is down because someone calls the floor. They do not know about the 45-minute gaps between jobs that add up to 9 lost hours a week, because that data has never been collected in a way anyone can act on.

How Bloomfield Solves It

Four tools built for how machine shops actually operate

Each tool connects to the systems you already run. JobBOSS, ProShop, E2, Global Shop, your ERP. We pull the data, structure it, and build software your team uses on the floor. No rip-and-replace.

Quoting Agent
Your estimator describes a new RFQ. The tool searches every similar job you have ever quoted, surfaces the materials used, cycle times recorded, margins achieved, and win/loss outcomes. A quote that took 4 hours of digging now takes 40 minutes with better data behind every line item. Built for the high-mix, low-volume reality where no two jobs are identical. Full quoting guide.
Knowledge Engine
Every setup note, tooling preference, fixture sequence, and feed rate adjustment your machinists have developed gets captured, structured, and made searchable. When a new operator loads a part on a Doosan that your retiring lead machinist ran for 15 years, they get the exact approach that works, not the generic setup sheet. Full knowledge capture guide.
Production Dashboard
Job status, machine load, delivery risk, and schedule conflicts visible in one place. Data from ERP, spreadsheets, and the floor merged into a single view your production manager can read in 90 seconds. What a production dashboard should actually show. No six-figure MES deployment required.
Equipment Intelligence
Utilization rates, idle time patterns, cycle time variance, and maintenance intervals for every machine on the floor. You see which 3-axis machines are overcrowded while a 5-axis sits underloaded. You see the 45-minute changeover gaps that are costing you 9 hours a week. Data that was always there, finally in a form you can act on.

What an Engagement Looks Like

From first call to working software in weeks

Every engagement starts the same way. We learn your operation before we write a line of code. The goal is working software your team evaluates against real jobs, not a slide deck about what AI could do someday.

  1. Discovery call. You walk us through how your shop runs. What you quote, how you schedule, where knowledge lives, what breaks when your best people are out. 30 minutes.
  2. Workflow audit. We map the specific bottleneck: who does what, what systems are involved, where decisions slow down, and where the process breaks under real operating conditions. We come to you.
  3. Data inventory. We catalog what you have. ERP exports, job travelers, spreadsheets, PDFs, handwritten notes. You do not need to prepare anything. Most shops have more usable data than they think.
  4. Scoped build. We deliver working software in 6 to 8 week phases. Your estimator, your production manager, your floor lead tests it against real work. We iterate until the tool fits the way your shop already operates.

Read more about how to run an AI pilot without disrupting your operation and what to ask any AI vendor before signing.

Tell us how your shop runs.

30 minutes. You describe the bottleneck. We tell you where AI tooling fits, what it would cost to build, and whether your data is ready.

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