Every shop has one person who knows everything. But what happens if that one person is out sick, away on vacation, or retires from the shop? All that institutional knowledge disappears with them, leaving many shops scrambling to keep business on track.
That all-too-common scenario is exactly why we built Chip, the AI built specifically for precision manufacturing.
Chip is a system of execution that learns your shop the way your best people do, and it makes sure they are never the only ones who know it. If you’ve worked in a precision machine shop, you probably know one or more of these overworked heroes:
- The estimator who prices a hard job in 20 minutes because she’s run every variation of it.
- The senior machinist whose setup notes live in his head, but nowhere else.
- The scheduler who holds the whole floor in memory, watching for what breaks before it does, and feeling the need to always be at the shop.
Those people are what make a great machine shop. At the same time, they’re also your biggest operational risk.
Why We Built Chip
The origin of Chip starts with a conversation we heard at a shop in Connecticut. Their operations manager, when asked how the floor ran so well, pointed to a supervisor named 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 you can’t find in any manual. In essence, Chuck held everything together.
Every shop has a Chuck. The problem is that Chuck is human, and any human must go home and rest, must take breaks and vacations and, eventually, retire altogether. What happens when Chuck is gone? The shop finds out exactly how much of its operational knowledge was living in one person’s head.
ProShop was built to solve this problem from the beginning. For 15 years, we’ve helped precision machine shops capture workflows, enforce quality and compliance requirements, and run tighter, more effective operations.
As we continued improving on our platform, we came across a recurring pattern. Shop data lived in the system, but the knowledge that educated workers was not there. A work order can tell you what happened on a job, but it can’t tell you why, or what to do next. And if all the knowledge your shop collects lives in the heads of a few people, that knowledge goes home and isn’t being put to work to make the next job better.
While the rest of the ERP industry has been bolting AI chatbots onto decades-old architecture, we spent that time rebuilding from the ground up. Today, you get to meet Chip. It is not AI on top of ProShop. It is AI woven into every part of how the system works.
How Chip Changes How Your Shop Runs
Chip works across three conditions that every precision manufacturer faces every day.
Expertise That Stays: Your Best People’s Knowledge, Available to Everyone
Your lead operator calls in sick. On the old system, that means a morning scramble:
- Who knows the setup on that job?
- Where are the notes?
- What was done differently last time to hit tolerance?
With Chip, the person who steps in gets the same starting point your best operator would give them. Every setup note, every inspection callout, and every correction from the last run surfaces at the point of work. First shift or second shift, experienced hand or new hire, the job runs the same way.
This goes beyond the shop floor. Your best estimator prices a hard job in 20 minutes because she remembers every similar job the shop has ever run — what it cost, where margin drifted, the setup surprises. When she retires, those instincts go out the door with her.
Unless the system already captured them. Chip remembers how your team ran past jobs, the rationale behind decisions, and the results of how those jobs actually performed. Anyone on the team can search for those records and make better decisions using actual shop data rather than memory.
If you walk into the shop tomorrow quoting a job you haven’t seen in two years, you’re not guessing numbers and hoping for the best. The estimate is grounded in what the job actually cost, where margin was won or lost, and what made it successful.
The shop gets smarter with every job it runs.
Early Warning: Problems Surface on Monday, not Thursday
Most shops find out about scheduling conflicts when a job is already late. Similarly, most shops find out about margin erosion after the invoice goes out. The problems were visible days earlier, but nobody was watching the right signals at the right time.
Chip flags everything – scheduling conflicts, cost drift, and quality anomalies – before they hit the shop floor.
Suppose a customer calls to rush an order. Your scheduler already knows what it costs, what it impacts, and what has to, or can, move to meet that revised schedule. Chip Scheduling models the downstream effects before the change is committed, so planners solve problems before they become disruptions.
Chip is always watching your schedule. If there’s a way to get more efficient, it flags that for you. As with everything in Chip, you make the call. Chip is a companion that answers your questions and prompts you with possibilities based on your data. It makes sure every decision, and every employee, can be as good as your best.
Compliance That Builds Itself: Audit-Ready Without the Scramble
In our recent survey of 144 precision manufacturers, 53% of shops could not produce an instant audit package without disrupting operations. Among the least digitized shops, 63% said an unannounced audit would disrupt production for several days. For the most digitized, that number is under 5%.
That gap demonstrates whether compliance is structural or manual.
Most shops treat compliance as a separate process — a binder to maintain, a checklist to complete before the auditor arrives. Chip makes compliance a byproduct of the work itself. Quality records, inspection documentation, training logs, and process adherence are captured as jobs run, not reconstructed after the fact.
When an auditor arrives, the evidence is already there. Your team doesn’t stop production to assemble a package. For shops pursuing CMMC Level 2, AS9100, or ITAR compliance, this is the difference between a system that helps you prove you did the work and a system that makes sure the work was done correctly in the first place.
The Closed Loop
These conditions are connected by a single principle: every job teaches the next one.
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.
As jobs move 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.
Built for Your Shop
AI products being announced across the industry very often share a common architecture; they’re built with a third-party language model (akin to ChatGPT or Claude) that’s wrapped around an existing data model, which is surfaced through a chatbot interface. It’s AI as a feature, added to a system that was never designed for it.
Chip is different at its foundation. It runs on your shop’s operational history that already lives inside ProShop. If you are a ProShop customer, Chip analyzes every work order, routing, cycle time, quality record, scheduling activity, and production decision you’ve made over that entire period.
If you’re new to ProShop, Chip will learn from every job you run, drawing comparisons in parts, materials, and tolerances used across related workflows. It will surface actual cycle times and costs collected from your first jobs, giving your estimators real shop data to make future quoting and scheduling decisions. Instead of leaving critical job costing decisions to human memory, Chip will ensure those figures are backed by empirical evidence from your shop floor.
Your shop didn’t start from zero. Every decision you made helped get you to where you are today. Your data has already been doing the work. Now with Chip, you can fully put that data to use.
Since Chip is native to ProShop, your shop’s knowledge never leaves your environment. Chip surfaces your real shop data through ProShop’s own data layer. There’s no third-party integration, separate AI vendor, or no data leaving your system.. It’s all native, living inside ProShop, and working for you.
The Shop That Compounds
The shops that will own the next decade are not the ones with the most machines or the lowest overhead. They’re the ones that get better at a compounding rate:
- Every job teaches the next one.
- Every correction stays in the system.
- Every person on the floor has the context they need.
- Every employee, regardless of tenure, starts from the best your shop has ever run.
Chip is available now for precision machining shops. If your shop is ready to stop depending on who happens to be there, we would like to show you what it looks like when your shop never forgets.