$112K saved.
8% faster fabrication.

At a glance

Eliminated 2 full-time office roles, saved $112,000/year in salaries, cut fabrication time by 8% (a full day faster on lead times), and reduced the operations manager's workweek from 60 to 45 hours — by automating custom bill-of-materials calculations and inventory forecasting.

The problem

Before founding RCJ Consulting, I ran operations for Shade Plus, a custom outdoor structures manufacturer — and like most operations managers, I was drowning in the urgent. Repetitive, manual tasks ate up hours every week: data entry, status updates, paperwork that moved information from one place to another without ever changing it. None of it was hard. All of it was necessary. And none of it was what actually grew the business.

The real work — the strategic decisions that determine whether a company scales or stalls — kept getting pushed to “later,” because “later” never came. I was managing the business's present at the expense of its future.

The turning point

Rather than accept that as the cost of doing business, I started spending evenings and weekends learning advanced AI and automation skills, applying them first to my own workload. The results were immediate: tasks that used to take hours started taking minutes. Work that used to require my full attention started running in the background.

With the owner's support, I turned that effort toward one of the most error-prone, time-consuming parts of the business: custom bills of materials (BOMs) for Shade Plus's louvered pergolas. Every order meant working out the exact math behind a custom configuration — quantities, cuts, hardware — by hand, and that math didn't get locked in until the piece was already on the shop floor being built.

I automated that process end-to-end: the BOM math, the inventory forecasting tied to it, and the ordering logic that used to depend on someone manually reconciling all three. Once a custom order came in, the system worked out exactly what parts and quantities were needed — correctly, every time — before a single cut was made.

The impact

• Two full-time office roles eliminated. The manual inventory tracking and BOM calculation work that previously required two dedicated employees was fully absorbed by the automated system.
• $112,000/year in salary savings. That headcount reduction went straight to the bottom line.
• My own workweek cut from 60 hours to 45. As the operations manager overseeing both the office and the shop floor, I got 15 hours a week back — time I could redirect toward actually growing the business instead of running it.
• 8% reduction in fabrication time — a full day faster on lead times. Because the math was right every time and part quantities were known the moment an order was placed — not discovered mid-build — the shop floor stopped losing time to corrections, re-cuts, and waiting on missing parts.
• More accurate, more predictable operations. Inventory management and forecasting smoothed out across the board, because for the first time, we had hard numbers on custom pergola orders before a single piece of material was touched.

The bigger picture

That experience taught me something I now see everywhere: small and mid-sized businesses across the country are sitting on the same opportunity I found solving one specific problem — custom BOMs for pergolas — in that operations role. AI and automation have moved fast, and most businesses — through no fault of their own — haven't had the time, bandwidth, or in-house expertise to keep pace.

That gap isn't just a productivity issue. It's an opportunity cost. Every hour spent on manual, repeatable work is an hour not spent growing the business, serving customers better, or building toward what the company was actually founded to do.

That's the gap RCJ Consulting exists to close — turning what I learned solving this problem inside one company into a repeatable, practical approach for the businesses we now work with.