OSH Cut CEO Caleb Chamberlain recalls his experience, and ultimate success, in writing production, inventory, and shipping software for his metal fabrication business.
We’ve been working hard to overhaul our production management, inventory, and shipping systems. We launched OSH Cut as an online, on-demand sheet metal and tube cutting service five years ago. And from the start, we decided we’d write our own software instead of integrating with off-the-shelf ERP software.
That decision has proved both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, we’ve been able to build “perfect” software that fits narrowly and specifically to our own workflows. Because our software was written by us, for us, we’ve eliminated friction that plagues more generalized software.
On the other hand, the narrow scope of our in-house software has made it difficult to grow beyond our initial value offering. For example, we designed our production routing and shipping systems to support a very specific workflow: on-demand orders placed online and billed and shipped immediately after completion.
