Looking for some early adoptors to help shape a Sign Shop MIS

[damonCA21]

My question is how many people actually need something like this? Anyone who has been in business for a while can price jobs just by looking at them ( unless there is some really weird specifications ) the same way a plumber can look at a job and know his material costs and how long it will take.
In over 20 years I have very rarely had to calculate every cost to give a quote, I know from previous jobs what the material costs will be and how long it will take to make.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

My question is how many people actually need something like this? Anyone who has been in business for a while can price jobs just by looking at them ( unless there is some really weird specifications ) the same way a plumber can look at a job and know his material costs and how long it will take.
In over 20 years I have very rarely had to calculate every cost to give a quote, I know from previous jobs what the material costs will be and how long it will take to make.

I think that would depend on a couple of things. How much costs are static that makes it easier to predict the cost (especially if it's not something that you normally stock, but can easily get) and it would also depend on how separated actual production working is to the one that is doing the quoting. Once a business scales, the tooling does as well. For a small op, that is easily doable (shoot sometimes I still use pen/paper and not the computer), but if I had things compartmentalized, that would be something different.

 

[Sign-OS]

It wouldn't be me if I didn't nitpick, but old school wouldn't have been an IDE, it would have been something like Vi (I use nvim by the way, I just can't resist).

While your "AI" model may have been your own, if you are actually pushing code, even in a private repo, to github, I would have concern there. Now if you are just using git locally, thats something else. I actually like Fossil, and just use my own servers.

Cant Fault you on that its still a modern way of doing it compared to nvim's

the point i was trying to make is that is was not built entirely by an ai on those no code platforms
my ai model is privately hosted no gits or repos involved

the code is pushed to github for deployment purposes but the source code isn't sitting in someone else's cloud. Git's on my own infrastructure, so no third party sits between me and the source.
hope this helps clarify

 

[Pauly]

My question is how many people actually need something like this? Anyone who has been in business for a while can price jobs just by looking at them ( unless there is some really weird specifications ) the same way a plumber can look at a job and know his material costs and how long it will take.
In over 20 years I have very rarely had to calculate every cost to give a quote, I know from previous jobs what the material costs will be and how long it will take to make.

Sorry but the software like this isn't "how many people will actually use it"

Sure someone with 20 years with exp can quote something by looking at it. but if that's a 1-2 man operation then you probably dont need it, nor want to grow into a 4-5 man operation.
Now if you have admin, a quoting department, manufacturing, then yes... software like this is super useful.

 

[Sign-OS]

My question is how many people actually need something like this? Anyone who has been in business for a while can price jobs just by looking at them ( unless there is some really weird specifications ) the same way a plumber can look at a job and know his material costs and how long it will take.
In over 20 years I have very rarely had to calculate every cost to give a quote, I know from previous jobs what the material costs will be and how long it will take to make.

Total agree with you, but what happens when you want to expand?

lets say you have another 1 or 2 people pricing jobs for you they need to know your rates how you calculate jobs and they don't have the advantage of your long experience with the company but if you put all that information into a centralised database like Sign OS then you could point them to that so you can work on the business rather than in the business

and on top of that it also has the advantages of helping you track the jobs through production, manage stock, suppliers and increase the speed at which things can be processed plus so much more
That's my aim for this to free owners up from micro managing their team and eventually automate the entire admin side of the business.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Total agree with you, but what happens when you want to expand?

lets say you have another 1 or 2 people pricing jobs for you they need to know your rates how you calculate jobs and they don't have the advantage of your long experience with the company but if you put all that information into a centralised database like Sign OS then you could point them to that so you can work on the business rather than in the business

Scaling is where something like this will shine. If a company doesn't need/want to scale anything beyond something that is prettied up xlsx files is just bloat and EstiMate would probably be what one is looking for. Oh Texas_Signmaker that was one that was started by signmakers for signmakers, and I think quite a few liked it on here at the time, so again, I do worry about this roadblock of why sign makers couldn't make their own software tooling.

and on top of that it also has the advantages of helping you track the jobs through production, manage stock, suppliers and increase the speed at which things can be processed plus so much more
That's my aim for this to free owners up from micro managing their team and eventually automate the entire admin side of the business.

If they are worrying about true micro managing (and not just actually communicating), there are other issues going on in and around that shop. The point of scaling in of itself is to alleviate some of that concern, if going through the pool of potentials correctly.

I don't mind automation in parts, but not in totality, especially if it's not my automation. If it breaks down and it's mine, I can fix that automation, if it's someone else, I have to worry about issue tracking (is it a big enough issue that it gets fixed within a reasonable time), does squashing my current bug cause 2-3 more bugs to show up etc? Yes, that happens even with my automation, however, I still can quickly fix that compared to back and forth.

The one thing that I have a concern with is SaaS itself. I don't have a problem with a web UI to a local program. There are ways to do that and make it 100% local (without having to do that abomination that is Electron (and ironically there are some Electron apps that I do like and they would only have existed due to Electron)), it doesn't even make an outside connection directly through the app. But if what passes for "AI" is really all that great, why aren't we getting more local apps that use even just immediate mode primitives if nothing else as that it's "AI" writing that boilerplate (but I'm digressing big time here)?

If we are going back to dummy terminal days (which I didn't like even back in the day), I would rather it all still be self hosted locally, maybe with opt in options for something along those cloud based lines (and that's being generous, I don't think some software should be on computers that have outside WAN connections, that adds extra vectors of security concerns).

I just really don't like a program that always requires a perpetual internet connection. I just went through 4 days of no internet and it just affected me, it was not an outtage of the provider itself. I would have been dead in the water for some things if I was totally dependant on SaaS programs (and I include Ai and other CC apps in this as they do have elements that do require perpetual connectivity. And while internet based apps can deliver rapid updates without actually having to do installs, restarts etc that in of itself brings about a certain level of instability as well.