John Never Met Robert. They Described the Same Broken System Anyway.
TL;DR:
Identities are anonymized, the stories? 100% real. John (Company A) and Robert (Company B). Two operators at two unrelated companies independently disclosed the same 13 manual workarounds. The costliest three are repair intake, BOM building, and sourcing/buying parts off the work order - each running minutes-to-hours per unit today. ​ERP.aero​'s rapid intake, digital BOM, and buy-directly-from-the-work-order collapse those into single-digit minutes or zero re-entry. Full detail lives in the article, the two standalone use-case docs, and the 13-row time comparison.
I didn't go looking for a pattern.
I went looking for two walkthroughs.
John runs Company A operations - teardown and harvest, piece parts, stock. Robert runs Company B - repair and overhaul, a live shop floor. Different companies. Different specialties. Different customers. They've never spoken to each other. They have no reason to compare notes.
So I sat down with each of them separately and asked the only question that matters: not how the system is supposed to work - how your day actually works.
They described the same company.
Not similar. The same. The same paper. The same re-typing. The same "I just keep it in my head because the system can't." The same person quietly standing in the gap where the software should be.
That's not a coincidence. That's an industry.
What follows is a straight teardown of both conversations, as in every manual workflow disclosed, exactly how it's executed, and the direct impact it has on operations. John's disclosures first. Then Robert's. No embellishment. This is what they said, in the order they said it.
Part 1: John's Disclosures (Company A Operations)
1. Bypassing System Quoting ("Read My Brain" Quoting)
How it is manual: The native quoting module is slow enough that John doesn't use it at all. He looks up capabilities manually, checks historic pricing by hand to land on an average, then drafts the quote directly in Outlook and sends it himself. The system never sees any of it.
Disclosed Impact: Every one of those quotes disappears the moment it leaves Outlook. No win/loss data. No pricing history the next person can lean on. The business isn't running on a system, it's running on Sam's memory. And memory doesn't scale. John said it himself:
"Obviously, that's not going to be the case forever, and I can't expect anyone else to read my brain."
2. Dual Entry of Shop Floor Finding Logs
How it is manual: Technicians never touch the digital system at all. Findings, required materials, corrective actions, inspection steps, all of it gets written by hand on a paper traveler first. Then somebody, an admin, sometimes the technician himself - sits down and retypes every line into the ERP after the fact.
Disclosed Impact: That's the same finding, written twice, by two different people, at two different times. Which means two chances for a typo, two chances for a dropped detail, and a system that's always looking backward, it doesn't know what happened on the floor until the floor is already done with it.
3. Re-keying Technical Data for Cannibalized Parts (8130 Block 12)
How it is manual: When Company A tears down a core assembly to harvest parts for stock, none of the technical detail follows the part: Not the CMM manual reference, not the revision number, not the block statement. John has to go find each harvested part one at a time in a separate inventory screen and hand-type the Block 12 compliance statement for every single one.
Disclosed Impact: This is compliance paperwork - the kind that has to be right - being retyped by hand, one part at a time, with every retype a new chance to get it wrong. John's own words:
"I can't have people spending 2, 3 hours trying to create all this with all the possibility for human error. Just to get an 8130 on a piece part we used in another unit just doesn't make sense."
4. Building Customer Teardown Manifests
How it is manual: There's no "parts removed" report anywhere in the system. To hand a customer a teardown manifest, John filters the list manually, exports it to Excel, and builds the spreadsheet, formatting and all - from scratch, every time.
Disclosed Impact: A teardown manifest isn't a custom report. It's a basic deliverable every customer expects. And it's being rebuilt by hand from zero because the system never learned to produce the one document it gets asked for constantly.
5. Sourcing Visibility ("Three-Module Dive")
How it is manual: The Work Order screen shows a status, "requested," "issued", and that's it. No visibility into the vendor quote, no PO status, nothing. To find out where a part actually is, John has to leave the work order and dig through three separate modules, or just write the tracking number down on paper.
Disclosed Impact: Sourcing status should live where the work order lives. Instead it's scattered across three screens, which means answering "where's my part" takes a scavenger hunt instead of a glance.
Part 2: Robert's Disclosures (Company B Operations)
1. Blind Repair Intake Work Orders
How it is manual: 90 to 95% of repair units show up on the dock blind, no digital notice at all. Receiving unboxes the part, reads the customer's paper Repair Order, and types every detail by hand: part number, serial number, customer name, work scope, estimated delivery date. The Work Order gets built from nothing, every time, for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Disclosed Impact: That should be a barcode scan or an email that parses itself. Instead it's a typing chore, repeated on 90-plus percent of everything that arrives, and every minute of it is a minute the repair isn't moving.
2. Rebuilding the Bill of Materials (BOM) Every Single Job
How it is manual: There's no master BOM template Robert's team can load and check off. Every Work Order starts blank. Every required part number gets searched for and added, line by line, from nothing - every job, every time.
Disclosed Impact: Skilled people are searching and typing the same part numbers over and over, on jobs that repeat constantly, which slows every quote down and opens the door to a misspelled part number ending up on record. Roger's own line: a clickable BOM template
.."would be outstanding."
3. "Swivel-Chair" Sourcing Loops
How it is manual: Once a parts list is sitting on the Work Order, Lisa copies the part numbers, leaves the ERP entirely, and goes searching pricing and vendors on outside marketplaces like ​ILS​. Then she comes back and types all of it, numbers, vendor details, markups, back into the ERP by hand to build the customer's quote.
Disclosed Impact: Every number gets handled at least twice — once outside the system, once typing it back in, which means quote turnaround is capped by how fast Lisa can swivel her chair, and none of that vendor quote history ever builds up anywhere the company actually owns it.
4. Manual PO Conversions
How it is manual: A customer approves the quote and nothing happens automatically. Lisa opens a completely separate PO screen, starts a blank PO, picks the vendor, and copies, pastes, and types in every part being ordered, then links it back to the Work Order by hand.
Disclosed Impact: The quote already knows what was approved. The PO should already know it too. Instead the thread breaks right at the moment speed matters most — when the shop needs parts on order to keep the job moving - and gets rebuilt by hand, keystroke by keystroke.
5. Running Production Off Excel (Dashboard Abandonment)
How it is manual: Roger doesn't use the native then provider dashboards at all. They show a flat number like "86 work orders" and stop there. To actually run a production meeting, he exports system reports to Excel, filters it himself, and works out externally which units are stuck in assembly, testing, or inspection.
Disclosed Impact: A headcount of work orders isn't operational intelligence, it's a number. There's no live WIP funnel, no view of where units are actually stuck, so Robert runs the floor from a spreadsheet that's already out of date the moment he exports it, instead of a system that shows him the queue in real time.
6. Manual Part ETA Syncing
How it is manual: The EDD exists - it's sitting right there on the PO line item. It just never shows up on the Work Order. So to schedule the floor, Robert checks the POs himself, leans on Lisa's memory for the actual delivery date, goes back to the Work Order, and types the EDD onto the header by hand.
Disclosed Impact: The data exists. It's just stranded on the wrong screen. Which means the shop floor schedules blind, and if a vendor slips a shipment, the floor only finds out if Lisa happens to remember to recalculate and retype it.
"That's not a system. That's a person's memory standing in for one."
7. Subcontract Repair "Hacks"
How it is manual: There's no real subcontracting module for parts sent out to third-party vendors for plating, NDT, or specialty repair. So Lisa fakes it. She builds a fake "plating part line" in the BOM, cuts a manual PO against it, and receives it back into inventory once it comes home.
Disclosed Impact: That's a workaround pretending to be a workflow. The system has no idea the sub-assembly is physically sitting on someone else's bench - as far as it's concerned, it's just pending inventory. Which means a real physical location becomes invisible the moment it leaves the building.
8. The 8130 "Also" Checkbox Workaround
How it is manual: In the 8130 generation screen, there's an "also" checkbox Robert has to remember to click manually, no prompt, no default, just a box he has to remember.
Disclosed Impact: One unlabeled checkbox stands between a completed inspection and a legal airworthiness release. Miss it, and it's easy to miss, and the whole step gets reprinted and redone. That's not a safeguard. That's a trap built into the workflow.
Summary of Disclosed Impacts
John and Robert have never met. Different companies, different specialties, different customers, probably thousands of miles apart. But strip away the specifics and you get the same system doing the same thing in both places, the same ad-hoc workarounds and the same paid service pretending to be their enabler: recording what already happened, and asking a human to carry the data everywhere it actually needs to go.
Not a system that runs the operation. A digital filing cabinet that gets updated after the operation already ran.
Paper travelers. Excel exports. A second screen. A checkbox nobody explained. Lisa's memory standing in for a database. Sam's brain standing in for a quoting engine.
That's not two people running behind on data entry.
That's an architecture problem, disclosed twice, independently, by two operators who had no reason to agree with each other.
I didn't ask John or Robert to make a case for anything.
I just asked them to walk me through their day.
They did the rest.
And if two operators who've never spoken can independently describe the exact same manual bridge-work - the same paper, the same re-typing, the same person standing in for the system - that's not a coincidence anymore.
That's the industry standard.
It shouldn't be.
I'll be in Orlando for ACPC ( Air Carriers Purchasing Conference ), August 29 through September 1 — if any of what John or Robert described sounds like your Monday or any day, come find me. I'm not going to pitch you from a slide. I'll pull up a real work order and we'll walk your actual process, live, and you tell me where it breaks. No booth theater, just come ask me the hard question.
One screen. No bolt-ons. Built for aviation.
If you want to see what a system built to match the work, instead of asking the work to bend around the system, actually looks like, book a 20-minute live quoting walkthrough. Use code KIT for implementation credit, or grab time directly at calendly.com/ralphmerhi.
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