Puplify / ChatGPT for manufacturers and job shops

ChatGPT for manufacturers and job shops

You run a make-to-order shop. The RFQ arrives as an email with three drawings attached, a quantity, and a delivery date the buyer has already promised someone else. The estimate is yours to build: material, machine hours, setups, tooling, a scrap allowance, and the paperwork the customer's quality system wants with the first article.

Most of that work happens in email and Excel, at night, after the floor goes quiet. Nothing is wrong with the way you do it. It is just slow, and the slow part is writing it up, not knowing the answer.

Puplify skills are written instructions you paste into ChatGPT. Each one handles a single job a shop actually does, and asks you for the things you already have: the RFQ email, the drawing notes, your hourly rate, the routing, the aged debtor list. You keep the judgement. ChatGPT does the typing and the arithmetic, and marks what it does not know instead of guessing.

The jobs a skill takes over

• Turn an RFQ and drawing notes into a job briefIn the $149 pack

  Paste the buyer's email, the revision numbers, and your notes from the drawing review. You get one brief that separates what is agreed from what is only asked for, and lists what to confirm before you price it: tolerance on the untoleranced features, material certs, finish, packaging, who supplies the fixture.

• Quote a batch with material, machine hours, tooling and scrapIn the $149 pack

  From the brief and your rates, you get an internal costed estimate and a separate customer quote. Setup split across the batch, run time per part, material with drop, tooling and inserts, a scrap allowance you choose, and every exclusion written down so a buyer cannot read work into the price.

• Follow up a quote that purchasing has gone quiet onIn the $149 pack

  Quotes stall because the buyer is waiting on their own customer, not because they hate your price. You get a short sequence of follow-ups that give purchasing a reason to reply, hold the quote validity and the material price, and tell you when to close the file.

• Price a spec change or a revision mid-runIn the $149 pack

  The drawing goes to rev C after you have cut sixty parts. This works out what is inside the order you accepted and what is genuinely extra, prices the rework, the scrapped stock and the second setup from your own costs, and writes the approval request to send before you touch the machine again.

• Chase an overdue invoice on a delivered batchIn the $149 pack

  Parts shipped, POD signed, net 30 came and went. You get the chase sequence, polite first and firm later, with the delivery note and PO numbers in the right places, plus the point at which you stop emailing and put the next order on hold.

• Check estimate against actual on a finished batchIn the $149 pack

  Put your quoted hours next to the hours the job really took, with scrap, rework, overtime and the freight you absorbed. You find out what the batch earned and whether the rate you quote next time should move, part by part rather than shop-wide.

• Write down goods-in and first-article checksIn the library

  The receiving and first-article checks live in one person's head. Describe what you do and you get a written procedure with the steps, the records to keep and the sign-off, in a form an auditor can read and a new starter can follow.

Illustration: 2,400 machined brackets, one untoleranced feature

An illustration with a fictional firm and made-up figures, not a customer result.

This is a made-up example, not a customer story. A 14-person job shop gets an RFQ for 2,400 machined brackets in 6061, delivery in four releases over twelve weeks. The drawing is clean except for one slot position with no tolerance called out.

Before: the owner prices it on Sunday night from an old spreadsheet, assumes the slot is general tolerance, and sends a number. Three weeks in, the customer rejects the first article because the slot should have been held to plus or minus 0.005 inch. That means a fixture change, a second setup and 40 scrapped parts.

With the skills: the job brief flags the untoleranced slot as an open question and drafts the email to the buyer's engineer. Once the answer comes back, the quote is built from 2,400 parts at 4.2 minutes run time, two setups, a fixture, a 3 percent scrap allowance and material at the quoted mill price, and it states that the price holds 30 days. When the buyer later moves a hole on rev C, the change order prices the rework and the scrapped stock and asks for approval in writing.

What the owner still checks: the hourly rate, the mill price, the run time, whether 3 percent scrap is right for this feature, and the wording that goes to the engineer. Nothing gets sent until the owner has read it. The skills organize what the owner knows about the job; they do not decide the tolerance.

Questions manufacturers ask