About RSA Customz
RSA Customz is a UK custom metalwork shop. Almost nothing they make is made twice: brackets, frames, guards and one-off fabrications, drawn up against a customer's requirement and cut, welded and finished to order. The work is skilled and the work is varied, which is precisely what makes it hard to plan.
A job shop has no standard build to plan around. Every enquiry needs an answer to two questions before anything else can happen: have we got the material, and when could we actually start? Both answers lived in somebody's head, and both were checked by walking out to the racks.
The challenge
Before Brytebuild the shop ran on a whiteboard and a good memory. That is not a criticism — for a small team doing bespoke work it is a perfectly rational system, right up until the point where two people are quoting at once and neither knows what the other has promised.
⚠ Before Brytebuild
- Material checked by walking out to the racks before quoting
- Offcuts and part-lengths remembered rather than recorded
- Jobs sequenced from a whiteboard that was always slightly wrong
- Steel ordered twice because nobody was sure it had arrived
- Promised dates given from memory of how busy the week felt
- A rush job quietly pushing three others back with no record
✓ After Brytebuild
- Stock checked on screen before a price goes out
- Offcuts and part-lengths carried as real stock, not memory
- One schedule showing what runs when, and what it displaces
- Purchases raised against what is actually short
- Promised dates taken from the schedule rather than a feeling
- A rush job shows immediately what it pushes back
"The making was never the problem. Knowing what steel we had, and what we had already promised to somebody else, was the problem."
The solution
RSA Customz use two parts of Brytebuild: inventory and scheduling. Not work instructions, not quality management, not the passport. For bespoke work there is no repeatable build to write instructions for, so those features would have sat unopened — and a system you only half use is one you eventually stop opening.
Two things, done properly, changed how the week runs:
Live stock
What is on the racks, on screen, before a quote goes out. Material that was previously confirmed by walking out to look at it is now a number anyone in the office can check.
Offcuts as real stock
In a job shop the useful material is often what is left over from the last job. Recording part-lengths as stock rather than remembering them is the difference between using them and buying them again.
One schedule
Every job on one view instead of a whiteboard and three memories. When a customer asks when their work will be done, the answer comes off the screen rather than out of a guess.
What a rush job costs
Squeezing an urgent job in always moved something else; it just used to happen invisibly. Now the schedule shows which jobs are displaced, so the trade-off is a decision rather than a surprise.
The results
The change is not that the shop got faster at cutting metal. It is that the two questions every enquiry starts with now have answers somebody can read off a screen, without walking anywhere or asking anyone.
Quoting stopped starting with a walk to the racks
Material is recorded as it comes in and consumed as it is used, so the stock figure on screen is the one to quote against. The part that mattered most in a job shop was counting offcuts as real stock — the useful length is very often what was left over from last week.
Promised dates come off the schedule, not out of a feeling
Every job sits on one schedule. When a customer asks when their work will be ready the answer is read rather than estimated, and when the honest answer is "not this week", that is visible early enough to say so.
A rush job stopped being invisible
Urgent work always displaced something; it simply used to happen without anyone deciding to. On a schedule it is obvious which jobs move, so taking the rush job becomes a choice made with the consequence in view rather than a favour that quietly costs somebody else their date.
"We do not use half of what Brytebuild does, and that is fine. We use the stock and we use the schedule, and between them they answer the two things a customer always asks."
The takeaway
RSA Customz is a useful counter-example to the way MRP is usually sold. They did not roll out a platform. They picked the two things that were actually costing them — not knowing their stock, and not knowing their capacity — and fixed those.
If you make one-offs, you do not need a system that assumes you make the same thing twice. You need to know what is on the shelf and what you have already promised. Start with those two, and leave the rest until you have a reason to want it.
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