True margin rarely gets measured.
Quoting draws on experience and instinct. Actual job costs — machine time, materials, labour, freight — seldom feed back into the next estimate.
Realtime Operational Intelligence
Integrated. Realtime.
Agentic.
Know what's happening across your operation — accurately, in real time, with enough lead time to act. Zipdata builds that picture in weeks, not years.
Integrated — one live system of recordRealtime — the picture updates itselfAgentic — AI agents surface what needs action
The Reality
Control is missing.
The data to restore it is already there.
Growing manufacturers often outpace the systems that once kept things running. The signals exist — scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and shop-floor knowledge — but they rarely arrive in time for a decision.
Problems tend to surface late.
An at-risk order, a worn blade, a stalled job — often discovered in the Monday meeting, when the customer calls, or when equipment stops.
The picture is always catching up.
Every manual handoff — inquiry logged at end of day, spreadsheet updated when someone remembers — means decisions run on data that already changed.
Improvement has no trusted baseline.
Quoting takes too long, downtime costs too much — everyone knows it. But without measured starting points, progress stays anecdotal.
Skilled time goes to moving data.
Compiling the Monday briefing, chasing order status, re-entering the same details across systems — work that should not need a person in the loop.
Departments work from different pictures.
Sales, production, and finance each maintain their own version of the operation — connected only by calls, memory, and manual reconciliation.
The Vision
Picture the operation
running as one.
One connected thread from first inquiry to final invoice — every order, job, machine, and margin visible in real time. Not a report compiled this morning. The operation as it actually is, right now. That's what it should look like.
Inquiry
Logged once. Pricing from one price book.
Quote
Costs pre-filled. Flagged if margin is low.
Order
Created on approval. Confirmation sent.
Production
Schedule driven by order. Cut times logged.
Inventory
Updated as jobs complete. Reorder alerts fire.
Shipment
Docs generated. Customer notified on dispatch.
Invoice
Actual costs vs quote — variance feeds next estimate.
One record, one thread — from first inquiry to final invoice.
Today
- ×Margin estimated at quote time
- ×Monday briefing takes an hour to compile
- ×Custom quote: 60–90 minutes
- ×Problems surface at the Monday meeting
- ×Customer calls to ask where their order is
- ×No baseline to improve from
What it should be
- ✓Actual cost feeds into the next quote
- ✓Briefing arrives before the meeting
- ✓Quote generated in under 15 minutes
- ✓Exceptions surface the moment they happen
- ✓Customer gets a proactive update
- ✓Every KPI tracked from day one
The Solution
Six problems.
One system that closes each one.
Control is built from six working parts — Data Hub, Watches, Automations, Agents, Feeds, and Governance. Put together, they answer every breakdown above directly.
Every job’s real cost, captured.
Actual cost — machine time, blade wear, labour, freight — is recorded against every job. The Estimating & Margin agent compares it to the quote and feeds the variance into the next estimate.
Data HubAgents
Problems find you first.
Watches monitor the live operation continuously. An at-risk order, a blade past its wear limit, a stalled job — flagged with the likely cause and a recommended action, while there’s still time to act.
WatchesAgents
The picture is always current.
Automations move data between stages — quote to order to production to shipment — without anyone re-typing it. Nothing waits for a human to move it, so nothing goes stale.
Automations
A baseline from day one.
One Data Hub records every KPI as work happens. A monthly Business Impact Scorecard — generated automatically — proves the saved hours, downtime trend, and margin accuracy in your own numbers.
Data HubFeeds
The busywork writes itself.
The morning briefing arrives before the meeting. Order confirmations send without anyone typing them. The re-entry between systems disappears — your best people stop being the plumbing.
AutomationsFeeds
One picture, every department.
Sales, production, and finance work from the same typed system of record — not three spreadsheets reconciled by phone calls and memory. One source of truth, updated as work happens.
Data Hub
The six parts
How It Works
Your operation, modeled once.
Then watched, automated, and reported on.
The same three themes from the start — integrated, realtime, agentic — are how the system actually runs. Built and proven on a live stone-products shop floor, now a standardized package for growing manufacturers.
IntegratedOne Data Hub, every source
Every source feeds one typed system of record — ERP, spreadsheets, shop-floor logs, even machine readings like amperage draw and cut times. One live model the whole business works from.
CustomersInquiriesQuotesOrdersProductionEquipmentInventoryShipmentsInvoicesCosts
RealtimeAutomations & seamless handoffs
Each stage triggers the next without re-entry — quote to order to production to shipment to invoice. The data moves itself, so the picture is never stale.
Quote approvedOrder createdProduction scheduledInventory updatedInvoice drafted
AgenticThe core — it expands what’s possible
Named agents — not a chatbot. Each owns a domain, runs on schedule or on trigger, and prepares the work for a human to approve. This is where the surface area of what the operation can do keeps growing.
Operations Agent
Orders · Production · ShipmentsReads every active order each morning, scores what’s at risk and why, and drafts the daily production briefing. Prepares customer updates when a promised date slips — held for your approval.
Estimating & Margin Agent
Inquiries · Quotes · Cost actualsDrafts a quote the moment an inquiry lands, flags any margin below threshold, and after each job compares actual cost to the quote — feeding the variance back into the next estimate.
Reliability Agent
Equipment · Downtime · ReadingsWatches the saws for blade wear and amperage anomalies, explains the likely cause when a machine stops, and surfaces recurring failure patterns with a recommended maintenance plan.
What the agents deliver
- Daily production briefing — before the morning meeting
- Weekly quoted-vs-actual margin report
- Monthly saw utilization scorecard
- At-risk order and equipment-downtime alerts
- Order confirmations and shipping updates to customers
- Monthly Business Impact Scorecard to the CFO
Get Control
Your first briefing arrives within 48 hours.
We configure the workspace, seed data from your operation type, and deliver your first automated briefing. You see your operation with control restored — not a product tour.