BRK-4471No revision recorded against it.
Alto · the manufacturing brain
The AI company brain for manufacturers.
Alto reads every signal a manufacturer produces, across the ERP, the mailbox, the drawings and the spreadsheets, and builds one picture of the business out of them. It quotes, commits dates, buys and forecasts from that picture, and a named person approves every move.
Quoting
Four requests read and priced
Against 23 comparable jobs and what they actually ran
08:16
Dates
Week 4 is the first week with the hours
Weeks one to three are already committed
08:16
Buying
Bar stock is up six percent since March
Two open quotes still carry the old cost
08:41
Margin
The Miller bracket ran 38 percent over
Third time on the same operation
09:02
Four drafts ready
HELD FOR APPROVAL
Illustration of one morning
One picture
Your ERP, mailbox, drawings and spreadsheets stop disagreeing with each other and become one record of the business.
It does the work
Quotes, promise dates, supplier costs and margin all come off that record, drafted and waiting for you.
Nothing moves alone
A named person approves every quote, message and write-back. Alto never sends on its own.
01 How it works
We learn how you build, then we run the office.
Alto connects to what you already run, reconciles it into one record, and learns how you actually price and schedule. Then it does the work that record makes possible, and stops for a person before anything leaves the building.
01 Connect
It reads your systems where they are
Read-only access to the ERP, the mailbox, the drawing vault and the shared drive. No migration, and nothing is switched off.
02 Reconcile
It makes the same part agree with itself
The part number in the ERP, the drawing on the drive and the price you emailed in March become one record, each number carrying a line back to where it came from.
03 Learn
It learns how you actually price
Won and lost quotes, quoted hours against the hours the job really took, and the customers whose parts always run long.
04 Run
It drafts the work and waits for you
Priced quotes, defensible dates, cost alerts and forecasts, each one held in a queue with its reasoning attached.
02 The manufacturing data warehouse
A manufacturing data warehouse, built out of what you already have.
Everything useful about the business already exists. It is just spread across an ERP that holds part numbers, a mailbox that holds the actual negotiation, a drive full of drawings and a spreadsheet that holds the real costing. None of them agree, and no one system can answer a question that needs all four.
Alto copies them into one store and makes them agree. Parts, bills of material, routings, quotes won and lost, orders, suppliers, standard times and the hours jobs really took all land in one manufacturing schema, and every value keeps a line back to the record it came from. That store is the thing everything else on this page runs on.
The same part, in four places, today
"the bracket"Priced on 2 March, in a reply nobody filed.
BRK4471 rev COn the shared drive, two revisions ahead.
4471Hours last updated in 2019.
Reconciled, not overwritten. You can always see which system said what.
03 What it runs
Quoting, dates, buying, demand, service and margin, all off the same record.
Quoting is the first module we ship, because it is where the money is and where the delay hurts most. It is not the whole product. Every module below reads the same store, so they agree with each other by construction.
Quoting
Alto prices your work
Every request that lands is read, priced against the jobs you actually ran, and queued for your estimator with the comparables attached.
Lead times
Alto commits your dates
Before a date goes on a quote it is tested against committed hours and the standard times that have drifted, so the week you promise is a week you have.
Buying
Alto watches your costs
Supplier quotes and confirmations are read as they land, so the cost you quote from is the cost you are actually being charged this month.
Demand
Alto calls your quarter
Quote volume, win rate by customer and the open order book are read together, so hiring and steel buys stop being a surprise in week one.
Service
Alto answers your customers
The where-is-my-order email is answered from the live order record, with the draft held for a person, and your supervisor stays on the floor.
Margin
Alto finds your margin
Quoted against actual on every job, so you learn which work is worth having while there is still time to change what you quote for it.
One day
The quote time reported by Top Shops, the top fifth of North American machining operations in the industry's annual benchmarking survey. They also book 19 percent more of what they quote.
Modern Machine Shop, Top Shops 2025
71%
The share of manufacturers and distributors who say a quote takes at least a day to produce. Nearly nine in ten report losing deals they attribute to manual quoting.
2025 Built to Sell Report, fielded by TrendCandy for Aleran Software, 200 respondents at firms with 100 or more staff
84%
Industry-average on-time delivery among metal fabricators, against better than 90 percent for the top quartile. Roughly one order in six lands after the date somebody promised.
Fabricators and Manufacturers Association benchmarking survey, as cited by Infor, August 202604 Ask it anything
The questions that currently take somebody an afternoon.
Once the record exists you can just ask it. Alto answers in plain language, shows the records behind the number, and lets you disagree with it.
- What did we quote the Miller bracket at last time, and what did it actually run?
- Which customers are we quoting the most and winning the least?
- Can we take a four hundred hour job in October without moving anything?
- Which jobs lost money last quarter, and what did they have in common?
- Which open quotes are priced off material costs that have moved since?
Every answer cites the records it came from
05 When the day changes
A rush order lands. The plan moves before you do.
A machine goes down, a customer pulls a schedule in, steel moves. Alto recuts the affected quotes, the promise dates and the buying list, and puts what changed in front of you. You handle the part it cannot see.
4RFQs read before nine
1Flagged, material moved
Wk 4First honest date
2Held for approval
0Sent without a person
Illustration of one morning, not a customer result
06 What it plugs into
Alto reads the systems you already run, and replaces none of them.
Connections are built against your own systems during onboarding rather than picked from a marketplace, which is why the version you are running is our problem and not yours. Shops on twenty-year-old on-premise installations are the normal case here, not the exception.
Epicor, GeniusERP, including on-premise
SAP Business One, FishbowlThe rest of the shop floor
Microsoft 365Outlook, SharePoint, Excel
SolidWorks, AutoCADDrawings and revisions
QuickBooks, Sage 50Costs and invoices
The shared driveThe spreadsheets that run it
07 Questions we get asked
Why a general assistant cannot run a manufacturing business.
Alto runs on Claude, so this is not an argument about which model is cleverer. A general assistant is very good at reasoning and knows nothing about your business until you paste something into it, which means it can help one person for one hour and starts from nothing at the next question. The assistant built into your ERP has the opposite limitation: it answers from the tables it lives in, and most of what runs a shop sits in the mailbox, on the drawing, and in a spreadsheet nobody has opened since March.
Getting your own history into one governed place, keeping it current as jobs close, and putting an approval step in front of every action is the actual work. That is what Alto is.
| Can it do this for a manufacturer | General AI assistant | The AI in your ERP | Alto |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read the RFQ and the drawing without anyone uploading them | Only what you paste in, one conversation at a time | No, it does not read the mailbox | ✓ Every request, as it arrives |
| Know what you actually charged for a comparable part | No, it has never seen your quote history | Only quotes that were finished inside the ERP | ✓ Won and lost, from the ERP and the mailbox |
| Know what the job actually cost once it ran | No | Only if job costing is complete and current | ✓ Quoted against actual on every job |
| Check the shop's load before promising a date | No | Scheduling and quoting are usually separate modules | ✓ Every quoted date is tested first |
| Work on the ERP version you are running today | Not applicable | Current cloud release only, on-premise excluded | ✓ Including on-premise and older versions |
| See the systems outside the ERP | Only what is pasted into it | No, by design | ✓ CRM, mailbox, drawings, spreadsheets |
| Write back into your systems under a named approval | No, it hands you text to retype | Some actions, inside the ERP only | ✓ Every write is signed by a person |
| Keep your data on a server you can point at | No, it is a shared service | Wherever the vendor hosts, on their schedule | ✓ Your own instance, in Canada |
09 Where your data lives
Every manufacturer gets its own instance, and it sits in Canada.
Your costing, your margins and your customer list are the most sensitive things you own. Alto does not pool them with anyone else's. Each client runs on a dedicated stack in a Canadian region, with its own database, its own storage and its own keys.
One instance per manufacturer
A dedicated server, database, storage and encryption keys. Nothing is shared between clients, so the blast radius of any problem is one company.
Hosted in Canada
Data at rest stays in a Canadian region, and the model that reads it is served from one too. We can name the datacentre in the contract.
A person signs every action
Nothing is sent to a customer and nothing is written into your ERP until a named person approves it. The approval queue is the product, not a setting.
Every answer shows its source
Each number traces back to the record it came from, and every question, answer and action is written to an audit log that stays in your instance.
The history stays yours
The record Alto builds is your asset, exportable in full at any time in a documented format. If you stop working with us you leave with the data.
It works in French
The interface, the drafted quotes and the working sessions run in French or English. Your estimator reads «soumission» where it says quote.
10 What is running today
Alto is being built with the manufacturers already running pieces of it.
We are not going to show you a customer count, because the honest number is small and the work is early. What we can show you is what is deployed, and exactly how far each piece has got.
Precision manufacturing
An owner who priced every quote himself now gets a suggested price on each request, anchored on what he charged for comparable parts, with the dimensions off the title block and what the metal actually cost on recent invoices. It writes a draft estimate into the accounting system and a draft reply into his mailbox, and stops there.
Deployed, on real data
Equipment distribution
The same product had different specifications depending on which file you opened, across 39 GB and more than 14,000 files. There is now one catalogue behind the website, the spec sheets and the sales tools, with most values carrying a recorded origin.
Live, feeding four systems
Precision manufacturing
A machinist was pasting the same hundred lines into every program by hand. The post now writes the part eject and transfer itself, on every job, with nothing typed in afterwards.
In productionDerik at Thrive was instrumental in taking incredibly messy data we inherited in a business we acquired and, through using AI, organized it in record time in a way that made it reviewable by our team for final review and approval.
He proposed solutions that were effective to implement and everyone on our team was impressed and happy to work with him.
01
Send us ten quotes
Ten of your own, won and lost, with what the jobs actually ran if you have it.
02
We build it on your pricing
The quoting module is configured around how you actually price, not a generic rate card.
03
It runs beside your estimator
Drafts only, nothing sent, until the numbers are ones your estimator agrees with.
04
Then the rest of the record
Dates, buying, demand and margin come on once the quoting data is trusted.
Design partners
Send us ten of your own quotes and we will show you what Alto makes of them.
We are taking on a small number of custom manufacturers as design partners this year. You get the modules built around how your shop actually works, and we get the shop floor reality that makes the product right.
- We start with your own historical quotes, not a demo dataset.
- You see the pricing logic and can argue with it.
- Nothing connects to a live system until you have signed off on what it reads.
- Tell us the ERP you run, even if it is twenty years old.
Got it, thank you.
We will come back to you at that address, usually within one business day, with a few questions about how you quote today.