How we cut order-processing time by 60% for Marlowe Fabrication
Marlowe Fabrication build custom metal components for construction and engineering firms across Essex, and by the time they came to us, the business had outgrown the systems holding it together. Orders, stock levels, and job status were tracked across three separate spreadsheets — one for sales, one for the shop floor, one for stock — each maintained by a different person, updated at different times, and rarely in agreement with each other.
They’d tried to fix this once already. An off-the-shelf stock management system had been rolled out the year before, built for retail rather than a made-to-order metal shop, and it never matched how work actually moved through the building. Staff kept working around it rather than through it, and within a few months the business was back to spreadsheets.
The practical cost was real: orders were being missed or duplicated, stock counts drifted out of date within days of a count, and because nearly all of this information lived in the owner’s head or inbox, very little could happen without her.
We spent the first two weeks on site rather than at a desk — on the shop floor, in the sales office, and in the yard where materials came in — watching how an order actually moved from first enquiry through to delivery, not just how the business described that process on paper. That mattered: several of the delays turned out to be happening at handoff points nobody had mentioned in the original conversation, between sales confirming an order and the shop floor finding out about it.
What we built came directly out of that observation. One internal tool replaced all three spreadsheets, built around the real sequence of an order rather than a generic template: enquiry, confirmation, materials, production, and dispatch, each stage visible to everyone who needed it, not just the person who happened to update the spreadsheet that day. Stock levels update automatically as materials are used in a job, rather than relying on a separate manual count. And because we built and delivered it ourselves — the same people from the first conversation through to launch — nothing got lost in translation between who understood the business and who wrote the code.
We trained the whole team, not just the owner, and stayed on for the first few weeks of real use to fix the small things that only show up once a tool meets a real working day.
Order-processing time dropped by 60% in the first two months — orders that used to take the better part of a day to confirm, allocate materials, and schedule now move through in a couple of hours. Stock counts are accurate in real time instead of being recreated from memory every few weeks, and the shop floor can see what’s coming without waiting for someone to walk over and tell them.
The bigger change has been who the business depends on. Before, almost everything ran through the owner directly; now the team can see what needs doing next without her — which means she can spend a day with a supplier, or simply be away from the building, without work grinding to a halt behind her. Nine months on, it’s still the one system the business runs on, not a pilot that quietly got abandoned once the novelty wore off.
“They didn’t just ask what software we wanted. They spent time understanding how we actually work first — and it shows in what they built.”