ProShop Unveils Chip, the First System of Execution Built for Precision Manufacturing
ProShop, the system of execution for precision machine shops, today unveiled Chip, the first AI purpose-built for precision manufacturers, at its Cutting Edge virtual summit. Compared to conventional ERP systems that only store what a shop did, Chip captures what a shop’s best people know and what processes work, then makes that expertise available to everyone on the team.
The announcement comes as the precision manufacturing industry faces a compounding workforce crisis. In a recent survey of 144 precision manufacturers conducted by Drive Research on behalf of ProShop, 52% of shops reported that institutional knowledge degrades within a single week of a key person’s departure. Meanwhile, 79% of shops still price jobs from memory rather than documented history.
The problem is one that every shop owner recognizes. Conducting research for Chip at a precision aerospace machine shop in New England, ProShop’s team asked a shop owner how his floor ran so well. He pointed to his shop supervisor, Chuck.
“We just gotta ask Chuck,” he said.
Chuck knew the quoting history, the machine quirks, the ins and outs of the traveler system, and the workarounds a new operator would never find. Chuck was the system that held everything together. Every shop has a Chuck — the person who carries the institutional knowledge that keeps the operation running. The problem is that Chuck has to go home, take vacations, and eventually retire. When he does, the shop finds out exactly how much of its operational knowledge was living in one person’s head instead of in the system.
“That person is the most valuable asset in the building and the single biggest operational risk,” said Alison Hawkins, CEO of ProShop. “Chip captures their knowledge, their notes, and their experience, surfacing it when needed or when prompted. Chip makes sure every person in your shop has the experience of your most seasoned operators, estimators, and schedulers, so the entire team can make the best decisions with the best information available.”
A System of Execution
While the ERP industry has spent the last year bolting AI chatbots onto legacy technology, ProShop rebuilt from its foundation. Chip is not an add-on or a third-party integration. It runs natively inside ProShop, where it works with a shop’s own operational history — every work order, routing decision, cycle time, quality record, and scheduling call is already in the system. Each shop’s knowledge stays in its own environment, organized and accessible only to the people who need it.
“We spent fifteen years capturing what shops do,” said Paul Van Metre, Founder of ProShop ERP. “Chip captures what shops know. That’s a fundamentally different problem, and it’s why we rebuilt rather than bolted on.”
Chip replaces the legacy ERP — a system of record that stores what happened, but leaves that information static and often obsolete — with a system of execution that compounds what it captures as every job runs. A system of record leaves a shop running the same as yesterday. A system of execution creates a closed loop: the work itself makes the system sharper, so the next job starts from a higher baseline than the last one.
The result is more accurate quoting grounded in actual profitability data, more dynamic scheduling with real-time what-if analysis, and a more efficient floor where every operator gets the right context and every machine can be monitored.
How Chip Works
Chip spans the full job lifecycle — quoting, scheduling, shop floor execution, quality, and machine monitoring — with every part built natively into ProShop. Any team member can query their shop’s data in plain language and get answers pulled live, no exports or saved queries required.
ProShop designed Chip around a closed-loop architecture where the output of every completed job feeds directly into the next one.
When a quote request arrives, Chip draws on the shop’s history with similar parts, materials, and tolerances, surfacing actual cycle times and cost data to the estimator rather than leaving them to price from memory. When the job moves to scheduling, Chip models downstream effects and flags conflicts before the planner commits a change that ripples across the floor. When the job reaches an operator, Chip guides the setup with the steps, inspection points, and notes from previous runs, so a machinist on day one has access to the same context as a twenty-year veteran. And when the job ships, Chip captures what it learned — updating cycle times, costing benchmarks, and quality records so the next quote, the next schedule, and the next setup all start from a better place than the last.
The most expensive thing in a precision shop is not scrap. It is making the same mistake twice. The closed loop is how Chip prevents that.
“Every job teaches the next one,” said Alison Hawkins. “This is the mechanical reality of how Chip works. The system gets sharper every day your shop runs.”
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Website: https://proshoperp.com/
