Quoting software helps fill the gaps in the fab shop

Oct 14, 2024

Hammer MetalWerks uses software from Tempus Tools to manage quotes for its long list of fabrication services, including sheet laser cutting. Hammer MetalWerks

If Derek Hammer knows anything about business, it’s that being the dependable one pays—especially when everyone else seems to have given up.

And for small business owners like Hammer, being a dependable service provider means offering fast and accurate quotes to customers. But more on that later.

Hammer, owner of Hammer MetalWerks in Indianapolis, actually runs four businesses, three of which primarily serve the TV and film industries. One of those businesses is Rob’s Rain Hats, a manufacturer of rain shields that can be fixed atop cameras and lights.

It was 2019, and Hammer had just bought Rob’s Rain Hats the previous year. Try as he might, he couldn’t find anyone to laser- or plasma-cut the thin aluminum sheet he needed to make the shields. The seed was planted for what would become Hammer’s fourth business.

“We couldn’t find anybody, so out of frustration, we went out and bought a really nice plasma table,” Hammer recalled. “We bought our little press brake, and we kind of geared ourselves up and started learning how to do this stuff. We were just doing all kinds of crazy stuff to try to make our own way here and kind of on the cheap because Rob’s Rain Hats … at the time didn’t have a very big following.”

The next year, of course, knocked just about every small business sideways, and few worse than those that had anything to do with entertainment. Hammer’s business plummeted: His revenue in April 2020 dropped 99% from the previous April. He was forced to lay off his entire staff. His wife closed her dance studio. His son, an aspiring engineering student, and his daughter, a high school freshman, suddenly had more free time. They both started working at the shop, and his daughter even learned how to weld.

And that’s when they got creative, taking what they already knew about metal fabrication and fixturing and using that to meet the need of the moment.

“Everybody needed COVID shields that go on counters—point-of-sale shields,” Hammer said. “Motion picture lighting always needs clamping and temporary mounting. I said, ‘Heck, we know how to mount and clamp things. Let’s mount and clamp some plexiglass to some countertops.’”

They did. Then they made some table legs and some other parts for existing customers. When Hammer posted some photos of those items online one Sunday afternoon, things got even more interesting.

“Six hours later, I looked at my wife and said, ‘I’m not very happy that I posted that stuff, because I’ve sat here and answered private messages from people all day wanting us to make something for them,’” he said. “Everybody was wanting to do these projects at home because they were bored and sitting at home and had nothing to do.”

ToolBox software offers features like a full 3D model of parts, which can be unfolded and itemized to accurately determine the cost of production. Tempus Tools

So, Hammer started making things like firepits out of metal and then spray-painted them. That took too long to dry, so he contracted with a powder coater who promptly decided to retire two months later. So, stepping into the breach once again, Hammer decided to start powder coating too.

That was September 2020. Things really haven’t let up since then. Entertainment revived, but now, instead of three film-related businesses, Hammer was bringing an entire fabrication operation to market. Today, Hammer MetalWerks offers plate laser cutting, bending, welding, and laser tube cutting, among several other services.

“We had picked up a powder coating customer that makes lighting trusses, and we picked up this and that,” Hammer said. “What we realized was that we were filling the gap, the niche. That was exactly the niche that I had trouble filing when I was looking for somebody to cut Rob’s Rain Hats two years prior.”

As business picked up and Hammer’s customer base grew, so did customer requirements—in particular for finer-honed edges than his plasma cutter could deliver. No sooner had he begun researching 2D lasers than a friend he made through an online forum called him and offered not only to sell him a 3-kW flat laser but also to send one of his employees to Indianapolis to help set it up and train Hammer’s people (who had since come back) how to use it.

A new press brake, powder coating system, and now laser tube cutting machine (installed a few months ago) followed. With that many machines allowing Hammer to offer more and more services has come a more urgent issue: how to deliver job quotes that account for all of Hammer MetalWerks’ services to its customers quickly and accurately.

After trying a couple of other vendors, Hammer settled on Tempus Tools’ ToolBox software. Hammer knew from his other businesses how to factor in labor and shipping and all the other costs of doing business to achieve acceptable ROI (“We kind of have that dialed in to where an employee can do it,” he said). But working all those variables into a fabrication quote is a different ballgame altogether.

That’s where ToolBox has proven itself, despite a few bumps in the road that Hammer readily stated Tempus has been quick to acknowledge and remedy.

“I’m searching for a way to shed the work off of me, the owner, having to price every job,” Hammer said. “I know from running this other business that if you want to grow the business and be successful, and you want to take a vacation, you have to find ways to push work down to people that you hire to help you. How do you do that and trust that person to get it right? Well, you say, ‘Here’s a DXF file from the customer, and you drag it into here and put in a quantity and a metal thickness and any of the secondary operations that the customer says they need to have performed on it, and out squirts a price in a nice little formatted quote that you can send to the customer.’ And then I don’t have to touch it because I know that you gave the customer the right price.

“And I also know that I can start to track all of those metrics,” he added. “And if we’re not making money, I know where I need to look—or if we’re losing bids because we’re pricing ourselves out of the job, I also know where I need to look. So, it puts the power of data in your hands.”

ToolBox does that with several features, notably by enabling users to quickly quote 2D and 3D assemblies of flat or tubular components, as well as bending and finishing jobs based on uploaded files. The software can integrate with other programs like QuickBooks so that users can tie it into their current invoicing process.

“Small shops typically rely on pen and paper or simple spreadsheet calculations to do their estimating,” said Jackson Barry, head of Tempus Tools’ sales in North America. “This process is very time-consuming and inconsistent. The conventional approaches often do not take into account all of the costs to run a job and a business—setup, secondary operations, direct and indirect operating costs, material markups. Small shops need to streamline, eliminate the busywork, reduce stress, and make room to bring in more projects.”

Hammer said having the data he needs helps him skip lagging measures and instead look at lead measures and predict things with accuracy. And as new people come into his operation, he has time to show them the ropes.

“It’s just a function of being able to hand that off to somebody else and go work on the business, not in the business,” Hammer said. “As an owner, what I find is the most valuable part of that is that all of the details that have to happen on the back end of a price quotation to a customer are being calculated every day out of sight, out of mind, freeing everybody up to do their job.

“I would say that I’m spending less time on quoting, more time on selling and on teaching the staff that I’m hiring,” he added. “In order for me to have time to be away from my desk and out on the floor teaching, [it’s] shortening my workdays down to something that’s palatable.”

For Hammer, the goal isn’t just to quote quickly, though. He hopes one day to push that task beyond the shop right into his customers’ hands.

“The thing we haven’t done yet is integrate it into a website,” he said. “Right now, we’re using it as sort of an in-house quoting tool only, but eventually it’s going to launch on our website and give us the ability to hand that over to customers to do their own quoting. And that’s where I think the real payoff is—for the customers who are willing, I can put that work back on them. Not that it’s hard … but there are a lot of projects for a lot of customers where I can put the quoting back in their hands.”