FilmTECH stopped hand-typing 18,000 work orders a year.
Every purchase order used to get re-keyed by hand into their MES, one line item at a time. Shredr now reads the PO, builds the work orders, and drops them straight into Ignition. A person clicks approve. That's it.
$0K
saved per year
0.0x
return on cost
<3 mo
to go live
0
work orders a year
Every order came in as paper. Someone had to turn it into work.
Brodart, the national library-supply company, sends FilmTECH purchase orders for super clear film in a stack of different widths and gauges. So do plenty of other customers. None of those POs are ready to run on the floor. They're a customer's request, written in the customer's language, that someone has to translate into FilmTECH's manufacturing system before a single roll gets made.
That translation was a person at a keyboard. Read the PO, open Ignition MES, and build a work order for each line. Match the customer's item to FilmTECH's item number. Figure out the right gauge from a free-text description. Add the markings, the comments, the pallet and shipping notes. Then do the next line. Then the next PO.
A typical purchase order has six line items, and each line item becomes its own manufacturing work order. Multiply that across a year of orders and you get roughly 18,000 work orders, all built by hand, all riding on someone remembering the details that don't fit in the boxes on the page.
One purchase order
Splits into 6 line items
Each becomes 1 work order
Built by hand. Every time.
Here's what that keyboard work actually cost.
It's easy to wave this off as “just data entry.” So we did the arithmetic. Each work order takes about 15 minutes to build from a PO line. Across 18,000 work orders, that's 4,500 hours a year of someone sitting there retyping orders. At $35 an hour, the labor alone runs $157,500.
Then there's the part nobody likes to count. People make data-entry mistakes 1 to 4% of the time, and on the floor a wrong work order costs roughly double to fix, because you're catching it, scrapping or correcting it, and redoing it. At the high end, that's another $12,600 a year spent fixing work that should have been right the first time.
Labor to build the work orders
4,500 hours a year at $35/hr, one PO line at a time.
$0
Errors and rework
At a 1 to 4% error rate, a wrong work order costs about 2x to catch and redo on the floor.
$0
Total, every year
The real annual price of converting POs to work orders by hand.
~$0
Now the order walks itself into Ignition.
Same purchase orders. Same MES. The difference is nobody retypes anything. A PO arrives, Shredr does the conversion, and one person approves it before it becomes real work.
Email pickup
POs land in the inbox like always, and Shredr grabs them automatically. No one downloads, opens, or re-keys a thing.
Auto-extract
Shredr pulls every field off the PO: PO number, line items, widths, gauges, quantities, delivery dates, and shipping instructions.
One human review
A reviewer eyeballs the converted order on a single screen and clicks approve. One check, one click.
Auto-create in Ignition MES
On approve, Shredr writes the work orders straight into Ignition through the API. They show up ready to manufacture.
The hard part isn't reading the PO. It's knowing what it means.
Anybody can copy a number from one box to another. That was never the job. The job was the judgment a veteran operator makes without thinking: this customer's request actually maps to that FilmTECH item, this description means that gauge, this account always needs those markings and ships on that pallet pattern. Get any of it wrong and you've made the wrong product correctly.
Shredr is connected to FilmTECH's entire manufacturing database, so it doesn't guess and it doesn't just transcribe. It checks each request against years of real order history and converts it the way the most experienced person on the floor would. That's why the output isn't a rough draft someone still has to clean up. It's a work order that's actually ready to run.
CSS number to FT item
It looks up the customer’s CSS number, then resolves the correct FilmTECH item number and any special markings from how that account’s orders have run before.
Gauge code parsing
It reads gauge straight out of free-text descriptions. “SUPER CLEAR 1.42 GAUG” becomes 177. “SUPER CLEAR 2 MIL POLY” becomes 179. No lookup table in someone’s head required.
Comments, pallets, and shipping
It appends the right order comments and applies the correct pallet and shipping logic for the order, the same notes a person used to add from memory.
One automation. Here's what it returned.
$0K
saved per year
0.0x
ROI against Shredr’s $36K/yr cost
<3 mo
from start to live
~0
manual entry errors on this workflow
Shredr costs FilmTECH $36,000 a year. This single automation saves just over $170,000, so it pays for itself almost five times over, and it was running in under three months. The data-entry errors that used to drive rework on this workflow are effectively gone, because the conversion isn't being typed anymore.
And this was just one workflow.
PO-to-work-order was one process at one company. Most manufacturers we talk to are sitting on around ten of these: the repetitive, paper-fed, retype-it-into-the-system jobs that quietly eat hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Add them up and the number stops being a line item and starts being millions. FilmTECH started with one. The rest are still on the table.
This was one automation. What are your other nine worth?
Bring us your most annoying paper-to-system job. In 30 minutes we'll show you what automating it actually looks like, using your workflow, not a canned demo. Pick a time below.
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