Built by a software operator and a shop owner who grew up solving problems together.

Kutz Fabricating has been running since 1937. When Nick took it over, the shop was still clocking people in on an analog punch clock — ribbons wearing out, timestamps drifting, a backup clock waiting in case the first one died again.

What came next wasn't better. His payroll provider's timekeeping add-on brought facial recognition and GPS geofencing into a welding shop — technology built for an office, not a shop floor. Safety glasses broke the face ID. The GPS lock drifted and locked people out. And underneath all of it, the system tracked time by job instead of by shift, so Nick spent every payroll cycle manually untangling job-level data just to figure out what to actually pay someone for their day. An admin was losing a quarter of her week to it, and he was having "did you mean to clock out early?" conversations two weeks after the fact, with nobody remembering the answer.

So he asked his friend Tim — a software engineer who'd spent a career building enterprise systems — for something built specifically for a shop like his. Not facial recognition and geofencing borrowed from a corporate badge system. Something as simple to use as the phone already in everyone's pocket: dead-simple time in, time out, with real job-cost data as the payoff, not the burden.

That turned out to be the whole insight. People on the shop floor were never opposed to technology — they already use powerful technology in their personal lives. The problem was that business software wasn't built for their environment. So FabWise started from the worker's experience: fast, tablet-first, respecting the pace of the shop, collecting the right information without turning the person doing the work into a data-entry clerk.

That's still the center of the product, and it's still refined against a real shop, real welders, real payroll — until it stopped needing anyone to think about it. But it was always the foundation, not the destination. From there we're going deeper: sharper cost reporting on every job, margin visibility from quote to invoice, and giving employees direct insight into their own performance so they can manage themselves instead of waiting to be told.

That was Nick's vision for his own shop, and it's the vision behind FabWise: help American manufacturing companies become leaner, more efficient, and more globally competitive by giving them systems that fit the floor as well as the front office.