About Oakdale Precision
Oakdale Precision Inc. was founded in 1996 with just three machines in a 700-square-foot space. Within six months, they needed more space to keep up with growing demand, so they rented out 4,000 square feet of a larger building that became their primary headquarters.
By the end of 2004, they assumed control of the entire 18,000 square foot building. Later, they added dedicated buildings for full service sheet metal and CNC swiss production. Today, Oakdale Precision employees 65 dedicated machinists and operates over 100 machines across 60,000 square feet of manufacturing assembly facilities.
Oakdale Precision has manufactured components for medical-grade equipment throughout most of their lifecycle. They’ve also expanded into aerospace and commercial computing, creating prototype parts for cooling systems and mainframe machines. As a diverse mid-market shop, Oakdale Precision offers Swiss machining, full-service sheet metal fabrication, and complex milling and turning as core competencies.
Their journey from a small, family-run business into a scalable manufacturing enterprise is a remarkable story.
The Challenge: Hitting the Glass Ceiling of Good Enough Systems
Jeff Justesen leads the Turning department at Oakdale Precision Inc. Having followed his father into the business—starting as a 14-year old part-time contributor, and officially joining as a full-time member of the team in 2006—Jeff has a wealth of history as a manufacturing expert, helping shape the growth and trajectory of Oakdale Precision’s development journey.
Jeff shared some interesting details about the process of cutting parts as the shop was building for scale. The biggest challenge with these traditional workflows was that all their manufacturing data was disconnected. It was lost in tribal knowledge that made it very difficult to build the right processes and workflows.
“When folks were just starting to cut parts, they would record everything they planned for that day on a notepad. Eventually, we built our own software, but it was really more of a glorified spreadsheet. We went through a few iterations of it, and it was very functional for a while. But it didn’t have job scheduling, quality management, or proper procedures built into it.”
Between spreadsheet software, physical paper routers, and whiteboards with magnetic cutouts—job scheduling grew into an unmanageable nightmare. Critical information lived in people’s heads, or on scattered computer drives like iDrive, sDrive, zDrive. Onboarding new staff or responding to employee turnover was too difficult.
Oakdale Precision found themselves caught in a growth paradox—that is, as they grew larger, their operating departments became segmented islands. Certain teams had custom tools the rest of the shop didn’t use, leading to communication cracks and inefficient workflows.
The team would manually process orders, carving out time for printing routers, cutting out magnet board tags, and physically sorting through growing stacks of paper. Changes to existing work orders wouldn’t reach the shop floor in time. This created unnecessary scrap or parts that had to be reworked.
The Solution: Implementing a Shop-Forward Centralized System
Living in a disconnected state of tribal knowledge and inefficient workflows eventually became untenable. Jeff took a leading role in search of a viable solution that could help streamline and modernize legacy processes entrenched across Oakdale Precision.
“It’s really hard to take a company that is so organically built with a lot of core folks that have been there for 20 plus years. It’s hard to train into that, to bring new people aboard, especially when the software containing all your operating data isn’t on the shop floor. We were a reactionary culture rather than a proactive one.”
Jeff convinced the rest of the leadership team that they needed a modern ERP solution. He wanted something that could scale alongside their growing business. He spent a year vetting different software providers, rejecting traditional ERPs that felt stagnant and “pre-canned.” Jeff was after a system that felt alive, responsive, and capable of meeting modern manufacturing data needs.
Upon discovering ProShop, Jeff saw what he described as a “shop-forward” approach to managing manufacturing data. ProShop gave him confidence that it could handle the expanding needs of a growing manufacturing enterprise like Oakdale Precisions.
Before fully integrating ProShop, Oakdale Precision ran parallel systems for about a year. They wanted to minimize disruptions with established customer work orders before implementing a hard stop date where all new work went into ProShop. By the time the trial implementation was complete, Jeff and his fellow stakeholders were confident they were making the right decision.
“Companies are expected to use data for feedback, and ProShop generates that data at all the right places. It’s accessible, useful, and built for a team that’s incredibly responsive. My career has taught me that a manufacturer’s greatest challenges should come from managing customer relations. ProShop has become a reliable guiding system that offers everything we need to control our workflows so we have more time and bandwidth to service our customers.”
The Results: Drastic Reduction in Average Lead Times
ProShop gave Oakdale Precisions the opportunity to process more orders in simultaneous rather than sequential workflows. Between ordering materials, inventory planning, calibration, and quality management, the entire business became more efficient and more effective. As a result, Jeff and his team completely transformed their operations and cut average lead times nearly in half.
“We first began implementing ProShop in 2022. I recently ran a query to see how our average time from a work order being created to a work order being shipped has evolved since then. In 2022, our average lead time was 4.3 weeks. In 2023, we cut it down to 3.6 weeks. And by 2024, we cut it even further down to 2.7 weeks.”
Jeff also highlighted how ProShop has created more real-time visibility into the entire manufacturing process. The entire team can fully trace how work orders are moving through the shop, ensuring they remain accountable to delivery deadlines. It’s made client relationships more fulfilling and less stressful.
In particular, Jeff praised how ProShop enables his team to run parallel processing of work orders. He credits the ability to run simultaneous work orders for helping the whole team develop a better understanding of the customer experience.
“We started to focus on how much time it takes for customers to request quotes to the moment the work order leaves the shop. That’s not where the journey ends, but we wanted to break those components down. Parallel processing has helped us eliminate waste so that our customers get exactly what they expect. ProShop gave us time back between order acceptance and order fulfillment, cutting our lead times nearly in half.”
The Quality Assurance: Built Into the Process
Under their old system, the Oakdale Precisions team would have to manually inspect parts at the end of the manufacturing process. This was part of the reactionary workflow that Jeff and his team strived to move away from. Thanks to ProShop, quality checks are built directly into the manufacturing process.
“That’s the real big win here. You can say manufacturing planning all you want, but what we’re really doing is quality planning. When we focus on ensuring our customer requirements are being met, it makes those client relationships so much better. Most of the time, the data we need is on the PO or the print. One quick look in ProShop opens up the PO so we can inspect the requirements and get those cooked into the part level.”
Jeff is especially proud of the built-in QMS that directly integrates with the working functions of the ERP. He praised the seamless ability for workers to get trained on things like shipping because the training modules for every part of the manufacturing process are readily available within the ProShop platform.
The QMS capabilities not only make training and onboarding easier, but they also simplify audit prep work for AS9100 certifications. Jeff noted that the audit-prep process that used to be a labor-intensive and stressful affair barely broke a sweat when an auditor visited the Oakdale Precision headquarters.
“Within three months, we completed our AS9100 audit. Best of all is that the auditor was supposed to be on-site for three days to go through everything. After the first day, they came back just to give us the results, and they said that ProShop made it so easy to verify QPs, NCRs, RMAs—every question they had, we had the answer.”
The Future: Focus on Customers and Expansion
Having fully integrated ProShop into their business model, the Oakdale Precision team is taking back control of machine shop operations. It means less time spent fixing errors, applying band-aid solutions, or putting out fires. Instead, there’s more time to focus on customer relations and the future trajectory of the business.
For Jeff, who grew up learning every detail of his father’s shop, ProShop is a welcomed, permanent addition to the expanding business.
“I know the pain that shop managers experience because I grew up here, experiencing all of this first-hand. And I can say that when you’ve got a schedule, a tool list, and a centralized system to manage all your data, it’s one thing you could never live without once you have it.”
Interested in achieving similar success for your machine shop? Book a call with our experts to discuss how to become the next Oakdale Precision case study and success story.