ForgePlan — One system for the whole shop

The problem

You don't have a software problem. You have eleven of them.

The quoting spreadsheetForty tabs deep. Only Dave understands it. Dave is on vacation.

The whiteboard scheduleAccurate until 9:15 this morning.

Paper travelersThe revision on the floor is not the revision in the folder.

The certs binderSomewhere in it is the material cert your auditor wants. Somewhere.

The setup notebookRetired with the guy who wrote it.

The accounting sidecarNever quite agrees with what the floor actually shipped.

And it's not just your shop. Verified reviews of the leading job-shop systems, in their users' own words:

"We have moved a great deal of our processes outside of the software, onto Excel."

"Crucial data is buried under a mountain of clicks."

"Took several years to get it to perform as an accurate ERP."

ForgePlan replaces the pile with one system where a job is one thing — from the RFQ hitting your inbox to the invoice getting paid. Nothing re-typed, nothing out of sync, nothing living in one person's head.

A day in it

Follow one job through.

The op numbers below aren't decoration — they're how ForgePlan thinks. Every job routes through your shop as steps, and so does this page.

OP 10

The RFQ lands

Oscar drafts the quote from your real history — material at today's prices, operations at the cycle times you actually hit last time, outside processes from vendors you actually use. You review, adjust, send. Win it, and the quote becomes the job. Nothing gets re-typed.

OP 20

Planning that answers back

The job drops onto a schedule that knows your machines, your people, and who's trained on what — and lets you schedule by the machine or by the person, whichever way the constraint actually runs. Strategy is set per job: start now and finish early, land just-in-time on the due date, or stack it into the lights-out hours your machines run dark. Ask "what if we pull the hot order forward?" and see the ripple before you promise a date. Material shortfalls flag themselves. Purchase orders are two clicks. Reorder points watch the shelf so you don't have to.

ForgePlan schedule board: jobs laid across machines on a live Gantt timeline, with machine and operator views — The schedule board — every machine, every job, live. Toggle it by machine or by operator.

OP 30

The floor runs itself forward

Operators clock onto terminals built for shop hands, not office hands. The traveler carries the print, the model, the NC programs, the tool list, and the setup notes from the last run — all at the workstation, nothing hunted down. Live machine data rolls in on its own, so the schedule stays true without anyone typing a status report.

ForgePlan operator kiosk: a live traveler showing the routing, current-revision print, tool list, setup sheet, and operator and QC sign-offs — The traveler at the machine — print, programs, tools, and sign-offs. Nothing hunted down.

OP 40

Quality, without the scramble

Receiving inspection, in-process checks, first articles with AS9102 forms that fill themselves from the job. NCRs and corrective actions with teeth. Every signature electronic, every record in the vault, and an audit history that can't be quietly edited — by anyone.

ForgePlan bubble print editor: a ballooned engineering drawing with numbered characteristics feeding the inspection plan — A print, ballooned right in ForgePlan — the bubbles feed the inspection plan and the AS9102.

OP 50

Ship it, bill it, done

Cert packages assemble themselves — C of C, material certs, inspection data, FAIR — one customer-ready package. The invoice posts to books that live in the same system, so what accounting sees is what the floor actually did.

Built-in intelligence

Meet Oscar. He already read everything.

Oscar is ForgePlan's assistant — four specialists that work inside your shop's own data. Not a chatbot bolted to the side. A colleague who never forgets a job.

Oscar · Sales

Quotes in minutes, not evenings

Drafts quotes from your part history, your rates, your vendors. You stay the judge — Oscar just does the digging.

Oscar · Schedule

Sees the fire before it starts

Watches the board, flags the collision two weeks out, and suggests the move while it's still cheap to make.

Oscar · Ops

Answers like a floor manager

"Where's job 4471?" "What's on the laser tomorrow?" Plain questions, straight answers, real-time data behind them.

Oscar · Quality

Audit-ready every day

Keeps findings, trainings, calibrations, and open corrective actions in front of you all year — not the week before the audit.

Oscar works entirely inside your ForgePlan — your jobs, your machines, your history. He makes the people in your shop faster; he doesn't replace them.

And his reasoning runs on Amazon Bedrock — FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure (Moderate, and High in GovCloud) that supports your CMMC Level 2 and DFARS 7012 requirements. Your data isn't used to train anybody's model and never leaves a compliant boundary. The AI that reads your drawings answers to the same rules as the people who do.

Hosted or on-prem, Oscar works the same. Even a shop with no inbound internet keeps him.

What's in the box

111 modules.

One system. Everything talks to everything.

SellPlanMakeProveComplyRun

Every module is built in the same system, sharing the same data — no integration projects, no bolt-ons, no duct tape. You license the lanes your shop actually runs, and when the work changes — you win your first medical job, a customer flows down CMMC — the new lane switches on with a license update. No new software. No migration. Same system, more of it.

See all 111 modules, group by group →

Look closer

The parts most systems fake.

Any brochure can list modules. Here's what a few of ours actually do — the details that make a quality manager exhale.

Bubble prints, native

Open the print, and ForgePlan balloons it right there — every characteristic numbered on the drawing itself. No third-party ballooning tool, no PDF markup side-project. The bubbles, the inspection plan, and the AS9102 forms all come from the same source, so they can't drift apart.

CMM results, imported — not retyped

Your CMM already measured the part to four decimal places. Nobody should copy that into a form by hand. ForgePlan imports the results straight in and lands each measurement against its bubble — the first article fills itself while the machine is still warm. And every measurement knows which gauge produced it, so an instrument drifting past its calibration date reaches you before it reaches your auditor.

RFQ management nobody else has

Every RFQ — the ones customers send you and the ones you send vendors — lives in one pipeline. Blast a vendor RFQ to your approved list and watch the answers come back side by side, comparable. Quote, follow up, win or lose, and know your hit rate. Most systems call a folder of PDFs "RFQ management." We didn't.

Paperwork that files itself

Upload the vendor's quote — it finds its RFQ, and the PO generates from it in a click. Upload the material cert when the bar hits the dock — it lands on that PO and its lot, and receiving issues the material straight to the job that's been waiting for it, cert riding along in the traceability chain. RFQ to quote to PO to cert to job — one thread, no retyping. Nobody plays match-the-PDF at 4:30 on a Friday.

Material pricing that gets you quoting

Every quote starts from a real material number, not a blank cell — ForgePlan keeps a material price library and refreshes it twice a day, so 6061 and A36 aren't figures you chase down mid-quote. It's built to get you close fast and save you the phone calls, not to replace your vendor's firm number: when the metal's moved or the job's big enough to matter, drop in the real quote and it sticks for next time. Close enough to price the job today — and honest enough to say so.

Tribal knowledge, absorbed

Every run teaches the system. Setup notes, NC files, tool lists, the fixture trick that saved an hour — they attach to the part and come back on the traveler the next time you run it, even if the machinist who figured it out has retired to a lake somewhere. And Oscar knows all of it: ask how you ran this part last spring and get the answer, not a shrug.

The honest comparison

How we stack up.

We'll say it plainly. There are two kinds of software running shops today, and we built ForgePlan because we'd lived under both.

	ForgePlan	Big-cloud ERP	The legacy job-shop system
Where your data lives	Your server, your building	Their cloud, their terms	A server nobody dares touch
When the internet goes out	The shop keeps running	The shop stops	It's fine — it never left 2011
Aerospace & defense compliance	Built in — AS9100D, AS9102, ITAR, DFARS	Add-on modules, add-on invoices	Bolted on over the decades
AI that knows your shop	Included — meet Oscar	A chatbot in the corner of the screen	No
From signature to running	Weeks — with the founder on the phone	A year and a consulting engagement	Installed 2009; config knowledge retired
Updates	One click, when you choose	When they decide, ready or not	Never — too risky to try
Built by	A machinist who ran these jobs	A portfolio of acquisitions	A company that left the business

Compliance

AS9100D AS9102 FAI NADCAP ISO 9001 ISO 13485 21 CFR Part 11 ITAR / DDTC DFARS 7012 CMMC · NIST 800-171 Electronic signatures Tamper-evident audit history

Walk into your audit like it's a Tuesday.

The story

Built by a machinist, not a startup.

I've stood at the machine at 6 a.m. wondering why the traveler didn't match the print. I've quoted jobs at the kitchen table off a spreadsheet I didn't trust. I've sat through an audit hunting a material cert through three binders while the auditor waited.

Every system I bought promised to fix it. What I got was per-seat invoices, modules that didn't talk to each other, and a support line that had never heard a spindle run. So I built the thing I couldn't buy.

ForgePlan is what shop software looks like when the person building it has to live with it. It runs in your building because that's where your shop is. It's priced so you own it instead of renting it forever. And when you call, you get someone who knows what a first article is.

— MarkFounder, ForgePlan

Ownership

Your shop. Your data. Actually yours.

Runs in your building

ForgePlan lives on a server you own. Your quotes, your prices, your customer list — none of it rides on someone else's cloud. Rather not run a server? We'll host it — and even then it's your own dedicated account, never shared with another shop. No neighbors on your database, ever.

No subscription hostage

Own it outright, with a price that fits how shops actually work: unlimited operator terminals on the floor, concurrent office seats instead of named-user games, and the compliance lane you run. Hiring an operator never means a software invoice.

Backed up like it matters

Automatic nightly backups, verified, with off-site copies. Because "we lost the server" should be a bad afternoon, not a bad year.

Leaving stays possible

Your data sits in your building in a standard database. We plan on keeping you with software you like — not with a lock.

Common questions

Asked by every shop. Answered straight.

We're not aerospace. Is this still for us?

Yes. ForgePlan runs machine shops, fab shops, mold makers, composites, weld and assembly operations. Aerospace, medical (ISO 13485, 21 CFR Part 11), NADCAP heat treat, and defense-cyber (CMMC) compliance are all there the day a customer demands them — and it stays out of your way until then. Machining is one lane, not the whole road: weld qualification, heat-treat lot control with pyrometry, AQL receiving, and full lot traceability carry fab shops, processors, and medical manufacturers too. Plenty of shops run ForgePlan and never open an FAI form.

What does it cost?

It's published — the whole sheet, no sales call: forge-plan.com/pricing. A $38,000 perpetual license you own, covering the whole operating core, five concurrent office seats, unlimited shop-floor operators, and the compliance lane you run. Lanes, packs, and seats add on when the work demands it — and hiring operators never raises the price. The first five shops get founders' pricing; it's on the page.

What do we need to run it?

A normal server in your building — the kind of machine a good IT person can order this week. We help you stand it up, and updates after that are one click in your admin console.

How does our data get in?

With us, not by yourself. Customers, vendors, parts, open jobs, price history — we migrate it together as part of getting you live, so day one starts with your shop already in the system.

Who answers when something breaks?

People who have run parts. Support isn't a ticket queue in another hemisphere — you talk to the team that builds ForgePlan, including the machinist who founded it.

The next step

See your shop in it.

Thirty minutes, your parts, your workflow. A live system — not a slide deck. Bring your compliance matrix and your seat count; we'll walk both, line by line, on the spot.

Book a live demo