Built for the manufacturers I keep meeting.

I've spent 20 years inside manufacturers of every size. Small shops, mid-market suppliers, global plants. Almost always brought in to make them more efficient. There's one sentence I can't stand hearing, and I've heard it in every industry I've worked in: "the off-the-shelf tool is too expensive, so we're just going to use Excel."

That's how you end up with 25 different spreadsheets running a business. It's how the auditor walks in, asks "how do you track this?", hears "we have a shared Excel and we save versions at different times so we don't lose it," and you watch a quality manager defend the company for the next three hours. It's how the maintenance team ends up putting parts on a credit card or a blanket PO and reconciling against a separate spreadsheet that no one updates. The CMMS quote came in at $20,000 a year and that was the end of that conversation.

And it's not because anyone is being lazy. The off-the-shelf options cost more than the operations budget. A separate quality tool is $10,000. A separate maintenance tool is $20,000. Engineering is still using a stopwatch and Excel. Each tool ships with a sales team, a deployment partner, a six-month rollout, and a license model that bills per seat for every new floor person you onboard. Small manufacturers don't lose to the behemoths because they're worse at making things. They lose because they can't afford the same toolbox.

Ignite Lean is what I'd want a 30 to 300 person operation to run on. One platform for quality, maintenance, production execution, and engineering. Priced so a small business actually buys it and uses it. The floor person on the line gets a tool as advanced as the corporate finance team's. Versioned work instructions, audit-ready records, controlled documents, real-time task assignment from anyone to anyone, integrations out to the ERP / WMS / TMS the company already runs. One person can deploy it. The team doesn't need a class to use it. Same tool from your first ISO 9001 cert through your first IATF surveillance audit.

My goal is simple. Give small manufacturers a real chance to compete against the global plants and win business they shouldn't have been priced out of in the first place. There's an enormous amount of waste in this industry that's still there because the tools to remove it cost more than the waste itself. That math has to change.