Built by a software operator and a shop owner who grew up solving problems together.

After Nick bought Kutz Fabricating, he saw how inefficiently the shop was being run and wanted to get it back on track toward a world-class operation. He knew that deeper control over systems and processes mattered, and that the first place to improve was communication between the engineers, the owner, and the people doing the work on the shop floor.

FabWise began as a small internal project for Nick's shop. The first goal was simple: see whether the team would use technology in a new way if the tool actually fit the work. When the first tablets arrived with the app on them, the lesson came quickly. People on the shop floor were not opposed to technology. They already used powerful technology in their personal lives. The problem was that traditional business software was not built for their environment.

One example was time tracking. The shop had used ADP's time clock, including a facial recognition feature that sounded clever in theory. In practice, it broke down in a real shop setting where safety glasses, masks, and protective gear changed what the camera could see. Other time-tracking tools were too generic, built more for front-office, legal, or accounting work than for a fabrication floor where people are wearing gloves, moving material, and trying not to waste time on screens that do not respond to the reality around them.

So FabWise started from the worker's experience. The interface had to be fast. It had to work on tablets. It had to respect the pace of the shop. It had to collect the right information without turning the person doing the work into a data-entry clerk.

That is still the center of the product. If FabWise can give shop workers the best possible experience, the rest of the system gets easier: owners see real-time work in progress, engineers get cleaner labor data, and future quotes start from what actually happened instead of guesswork.

That was Nick's vision for his own shop, and it is the vision behind FabWise: help American manufacturing companies become leaner, more efficient, and more globally competitive by giving them systems that fit the floor as well as the front office.