Workflow Automation Transforms Moldmaking Operations

In moldmaking, managing workflows across departments is critical — even small delays or miscommunications can impact delivery and quality. Legacy Precision Molds recognized the need to enhance visibility and coordination across their operations and turned to JobTraQ to streamline processes, reduce manual effort and improve team collaboration.

The company, a full-service plastic injection mold builder in Michigan, had reached a critical point where its traditional methods of tracking work simply couldn't keep up with its growth. Their journey reflects the evolution many shops experience: starting with handwritten notes on legal pads, progressing to increasingly complex Excel spreadsheets and eventually hitting a wall.

"There's a point at which your operations start to scale where traditional methods like an Excel spreadsheet or a simple database just breaks down," explains Tyler VanRee, president and second-generation owner of Legacy Precision Molds. "I bought the business from my dad. He started it in 1995. We design and build high-precision plastic injection molds and their related components. We also do custom machining as well as a variety of repair and engineering changes."

The challenges facing Legacy Precision Molds are familiar to most shops: delayed approvals causing production bottlenecks, communication gaps between engineering and the shop floor and limited visibility into job status across departments. As the company grew, these issues became more serious, threatening their ability to deliver quality products on time.

The Search for a Better Solution

VanRee knew that to stay competitive, the company needed a more sophisticated system to manage its workflows. The team struggled with tracking progress across multiple departments. Plus, the lack of real-time visibility into project status made it difficult to optimize resource allocation and decision-making.

"We looked at many off-the-shelf ERP solutions and there were various challenges like having to do a lot of customization to get it to function the way we want," VanRee says. "We quickly became discouraged because most ERP systems are geared for production manufacturing, not moldmaking, where everything is custom. No two parts go through the exact same steps.”

"What sets JobTraQ apart is the functionality to grow and scale your business — your way. That’s what truly differentiates this platform from other solutions." 

This meant VanRee also needed a system flexible enough to manage varied workflows. So, the scheduling functionality is critical, which in most ERP systems fell short of their needs. "Our schedule, our workflow, the way things flow through our organization, is core to whether we function well for our customers or not."

When investigating potential ERP solutions, VanRee made a point to ask current users about the scheduling capabilities. "I spent a lot of time on the phone talking to users of these systems. My number one question was, 'How do you like the scheduling?' More often than not, people respond with, 'Oh, we don’t use it. It doesn’t work well.' I can't believe it! Here you have this comprehensive ERP system and the one feature most essential to your business is not utilized at all. Instead, users just find ways to work around it."

Discovering a No-Code Solution

Everything changed when VanRee found JobTraQ, a no-code workflow automation platform. The discovery happened unexpectedly at a local manufacturing trade show. "It wasn't even plastics-related," VanRee recalls. "We were just wandering through and saw their monitor looping a demo. I thought, 'Interesting, maybe this could be something.' But I walked away thinking, there's got to be a catch."

What makes this platform different is that it gives users complete control to build and customize the system exactly how they need it. Unlike systems that require coding or IT expertise, JobTraQ enables team members to create and adjust workflows themselves using a simple drag-and-drop interface. "Our team was able to configure workflows quickly, ensuring that our processes were aligned with production goals," VanRee explains.

Tasks are automatically assigned to the right team members, reducing delays and improving efficiency. Users can also identify bottlenecks instantly, whether it's a material delay or a machining issue.

“Engineers can track shop floor progress in real time, while production teams stay updated on design changes. This real-time visibility and reporting enhances tracking and decision-making,” Carl Casserly, JobTraQ sales operations manager says.

Another advantage is that JobTraQ integrates seamlessly across the tech stack, enabling end-to-end connectivity throughout the operation. With no-code integration options via Zapier and Microsoft Power Platform connectors, teams can quickly connect JobTraQ to over 7,000 applications. For more complex integration requirements, JobTraQ also offers robust REST APIs to support custom integrations. “This flexibility ensures organizations can unify systems, streamline processes and maintain full traceability across their workflows,” Casserly says.

The no-code aspect was particularly valuable. "You still need a general understanding of your business, but you don't need a programming background," says VanRee. "JobTraQ provides the training. Once you understand how your business runs and they show you how the software works, you can build something that fits perfectly."

Implement and Adapt

Legacy's implementation took about four to five months. "That included training, developing the system, gathering internal feedback and building it out. Then after implementing JobTraQ, we experienced a swift and seamless transition across teams. Within a couple of days, everybody was up and running,” VanRee says.  This quick adoption was due to how deeply the system could be tailored.

While JobTraQ typically recommends small-scale rollouts to ensure adoption, Legacy chose a different approach. They dove in and replaced their main job management system right away.  “We decided to do the heavy lifting up front," VanRee says. "It was more effort, but absolutely worth it. No regrets."

By involving employees in the configuration phase, the team built interfaces and dashboards around how their people actually think and work, capturing preferences, dislikes and pain points from the beginning.

"We really built it around our people," VanRee explains. "We asked them, 'What do you like about our current system? What do you wish you had?' And we were able to take a large majority of that and just plug it in."

Another key benefit was JobTraQ’s real-time adaptability. "If something doesn't work the way we need it to, we can fix it ourselves — often in minutes. Our previous systems would be improved in 'chunks' at a time since we had to employ outside development to help us. Now, we can make changes same day, which leads to better employee buy-in as they see their suggestions being implemented in real time as problems come up or as new ideas are born," he says.

This autonomy eliminated the long wait times and cost of external development. Layered permissions also meant an internal admin could carefully manage changes, while employees submitted requests as needed.

Expanded Scope and Substantial Growth

The implementation of JobTraQ generated transformative efficiency gains and higher employee satisfaction. The implementation has allowed Legacy to capture much more detailed information about its operations than was previously possible. "With JobTraQ, we've been able to add more metrics, more tracking data and more user input data. So now we can see more of what's going on in our organization day-to-day," VanRee says.

Legacy has leveraged JobTraQ’s customization capabilities to create

sophisticated operational dashboards that provide real-time visibility into production capacity and workflow management. These custom dashboards display machine capacities, enabling operators to anticipate workloads and optimize their pipeline scheduling. The platform has also been enhanced with custom navigation links that provide instant access to critical job information, eliminating the time-consuming process of searching through multiple system interfaces.

The enhanced data collection capabilities have revolutionized Legacy's approach to project tracking and cost management. User input fields now capture detailed job information, serving as valuable reference material for future projects. Integrated labor and material cost tracking provides comprehensive project costing data.

"Prior to this, we would have to wait for payroll to be processed to ensure we had a clear picture of time spent and costs incurred. Now — it’s all there in real time," VanRee explains. This real-time visibility has particularly streamlined the billing process, as all necessary cost data is immediately available upon job completion.

Machine operator productivity tracking has been significantly improved through the implementation of separate input fields for attended versus unattended time logging. "We were also able to add separate inputs for machine operators to log attended versus unattended time," VanRee notes. This granular time tracking, which was previously managed through inadequate manual methods, now automatically captures data at the individual task level and seamlessly integrates with job metrics reporting in the background.

The scope of what Legacy can manage through JobTraQ has expanded significantly beyond their initial needs. Legacy now has improved tracking on quoting, including the number of quotes and win rates based on multiple criteria. This was a manual process prior to JobTraQ — now it's all automatically populated and at their fingertips.

"Our old system created a job all the way to shipping it, but now we're

incorporating job costing, purchasing, quoting and quality metrics to fulfill our ISO requirements. A lot of these things are all handled inside JobTraQ and they're handled really well," VanRee says.

Speaking of ISO, Legacy’s audits have been simplified with the detailed audit trail JobTraQ has built into the system. No more digging through folders to find multiple records for audits — they are all linked at the job level and easily tracked through the audit trail to see what happened and when. Every user input is tracked and can be traced in the audit trail.

For VanRee, what truly sets JobTraQ apart is its flexibility and capacity for growth and customization. "The functionality that exists to grow and scale your business, the way that you want, is the one thing that differentiates this platform from other solutions."