About Die Craft Machine
Founded in 1970 and located in Cincinnati, Ohio, Die Craft Machine grew from a small machine shop into a thriving 32,000-square-foot facility. With a team of 34 employees and 21 CNC machines—primarily Haas and DN Solutions—Die Craft has many support processes for precision manufacturing.
The company’s roots lie in industrial repair. President Justin Westerfeld has steered the business toward modern parts manufacturing and contract manufacturing. Die Craft operates in a high-mix, low-volume environment, leveraging heavy machinery and technical engineering to create customized manufactured parts. They’re also ISO 9001:2015 certified, functioning as a reliable engineering, precision machining, and fabrication partner.
The Challenge: outgrowing a limited legacy ERP
Before ProShop, Die Craft Machine had an on-prem server-based ERP system. The software became outdated, largely due to Windows compatibility issues. Future Windows updates were not going to be supported by that piece of software, making the platform obsolete.
They were forced to use paper travelers, with printouts scattered all over the shop floor. Workers had to chase part orders down, losing excessive working time to laborious job tracking. Additionally, the legacy system only had seven licensed seats. Only a handful of workers could actually interact with the system.
Simultaneously, the company was undergoing a transition as two key employees—a VP with 52 years of service and an office manager of 20 years—were retiring. These individuals were deeply embedded in the company’s accounting, HR, and shop support services. Justin realized the future of Die Craft would be a more challenging transition without a digitized method to capture legacy tribal knowledge and deep institutional experience.
“We had job travelers printed out all over the floor. The management team had access and knew what was going on, but everything for the floor was static. That physical paper environment was hard to scale, hard to improve, and challenging to know where you stood at any given time.”
The Solution: centralized job tracking and visibility
Die Craft implemented ProShop to capture all the shop’s operating data and centralize legacy knowledge in one single source of truth. ProShop provided a centralized hub that standardized all shop operating data, solving Die Craft’s tribal knowledge challenges.
For Justin, ProShop helped him develop a better understanding of P&L statements and how to incorporate better financial responsibilities into the business.
“I’d never really had a whole lot of P &L responsibility or understanding a lot more of the financial side of the business. Our old system helped with accounting, but I always looked at it kind of like a crescent wrench. It fits everything, but I don’t know if it did anything well.”
Initially, the team attempted to force their old pricing models into ProShop before they discovered ProShop’s automated job costing features. Justin describes the ProShop job costing method as a “three-headed dragon,” equally computing machine overhead, fully burdened labor rates, and indirect overhead costs to create a complete P&L statement.
Democratizing this data in one centralized location gave the entire Die Craft team—all 34 employees—real-time access to the tools, prints, and schedules they needed to make more calculated decisions for the business.
“We definitely rewrote the script at the beginning of ’25. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous impact in our business. You know how you do on a job immediately because there’s an icon on the work order that calculates your profitability from completing, shipping, and invoicing a job. And that wasn’t something we had before.”
The Results:
Higher profit margins
Die Craft used ProShop’s real-time job costing capabilities to defend their pricing models with clients. Sometimes, there’s a big jump in how jobs should be valued vs. the actual quotes that are submitted to customers. With ProShop providing up-to-the-minute accounting of job costs, Die Craft can give customers tangible evidence to explain higher quotes.
The team also used ProShop to delve deeper into the labor vs. machine portions of their overhead costs. Die Craft had lost a specific part number contract because the customer perceived a quote as too expensive. The team input their machine rate operating data into ProShop’s job costing module. They concluded that running certain jobs unattended at night on their pallet changing machines could reduce their operating expenses.
In doing so, they went back to the customer and were able to offer a 50% cost reduction without cutting into any of their margins. Justin credits ProShop with teaching his team how to modernize job costing and validate the quotes they supply to customers.
“We got the rework business and the new part business. I wouldn’t have even thought of those savings opportunities without spending a ton of time manually running numbers through spreadsheets. Now, being able to immediately calculate accurate margins and pass on savings to customers not only protects our margins, but it preserves our client relationships too.”
Secure compliance audits
Since implementing ProShop, Die Craft has undergone two ISO 9001:2015 audits. In both cases, beyond a few OFIs that fall outside compliance parameters, there were zero issues that impeded their certifications.
Justin shared how auditors aren’t the only people to whom he shows off ProShop. He also takes customers who undergo shop tours through the system, and the feedback from everyone has been nothing short of stellar.
“Everyone is blown away by our system—by ProShop, how clean it is, how organized it is. We recently hosted a shop tour for a customer much larger than us whose purchasing agent was auditing part counts because their internal system didn’t match reality. I walked him through our ProShop records—specific part number releases, packing slips, invoice history—all clean, traceable, and immediately verifiable. Within minutes, he stopped the audit and said, ‘I trust your data more than ours. I’m confident your system is right and ours is wrong.’”
Cost-saving efficiencies
ProShop has also helped Die Craft unlock more capacity without requiring additional headcount. Around the time they began implementing ProShop in early 2024, Die Craft had 11 people working in the shop’s front office. By the beginning of 2026, only six people work in the office.
Justin credits ProShop for simplifying administrative tasks like generating customer POs, arranging shipments, adding packing slips, invoice tracking, and more. Processing incoming orders used to take three to five business days. With ProShop, the work is completed in under one day.
Die Craft also cut their job lead times by nearly 50% since implementing ProShop. Using their old system, job lead times were 8 to 10 weeks long, well beyond the four to six week lead time that was comfortable for customers. As a result, they lost business because customers didn’t have faith in their capacity to get more work done.
Upon implementing ProShop, Justin contacted those same customers and confidently told them that Die Craft now had the capacity to handle more jobs. Enough clients were receptive to his calls, and Justin proudly highlighted Die Craft’s increase in revenue throughput—particularly in the milling and precision manufacturing sides of the business.
“Milling throughput forms the core of our business model. That’s what we focus on most. I would say that we’ve easily opened up another 20% capacity through our vertical milling.”
The Advocacy: winning over the shop floor
The transition to a paperless floor was met with initial skepticism, particularly from veteran machinists. One lathe operator, initially resistant to using a computer, eventually became so reliant on his workstation that he was distraught when an accident damaged his computer, leaving him without ProShop access for a few days.
The team now relies on the system for time tracking and accessing setup information. They’ve eliminated the need to flock to a single time clock or hunt for physical files.
“From the guy that said, ‘I’ll never do this’ to then being completely upset that he was down for a few days…it’s funny thinking about how people warm up to the new system. Once they realized that we were giving them a better resource to time track and do all the things that were needed for the business, they quickly came around and embraced the modern way of doing things.”
The Future: Strategic Leadership
With administrative burdens lifted, Justin Westerfeld can now focus on his role as President. It’s a series of strategic responsibilities that focus on growing the business rather than managing paperwork.
“ProShop is not only a software solution. It’s a community of like-minded leaders in manufacturing. And if you get into the circle, there’s just so much to learn and so much to garner. When I became president in ‘23, I was really drinking from a firehose, learning new rules and wearing a lot of new hats. I don’t know that there’s enough discussion about how well you can learn to run your business by partnering with ProShop.”