Job sheets came back late, wet, or blank
When Brendan Kenney bought into BWC Stainless around six years ago, the shop ran on a diary. Three people, then four. It worked because it had to. At six, the diary became a shared Google Calendar, which held the schedule but not much else.
Everything that mattered after the schedule - what a job actually cost, where the drawings were, who was on what - lived on paper job sheets that went out to the floor and came back whenever they came back.
The gap was not laziness on the floor. It was that nobody could see the hole until the job closed and the paper turned up. Brendan would leave for four and a half hours to do a couple of site measures and come back to piece together what the crew had been doing. Most of the time he could. There was always one he could not.
One spot, and the crew carries it in their pocket
BWC moved onto Factory in March 2024 and took it on in pieces rather than all at once - orders and the planner first, then documents, then time. Brendan describes it as buying off another chunk of Factory every few months.
The crew now uses the mobile app on the floor and on site. The full structural plans go on the order, so what a fabricator needs is on their phone instead of scribbled on a bit of paper that gets lost or gets wet. Brendan can open the admin screen and see, live, who is clocked onto what.
"I can leave here at the end of the week, and there'd be not a bit of paper on my desk. But I know all that information's still in one spot, it's easy enough to find."
It travels, too. Brendan took a call from the crew while out on a site measure, pulled the job up on his phone, and had the answer without going back to the shop. Same for the detail nobody writes down until they need it - the customer's phone number on a job from three weeks ago.
The change so far
on the crew
BWC doubled its team in the two and a half years since moving onto Factory - in a town where the industry went the other way. Brendan counts about 14 fabricators when he started his apprenticeship. Three are left.
"We've managed to double our team as well, which has been good. And we couldn't have done that if we weren't using something like this."
An apprentice who left for the mines, came back, and bought in
Brendan served his apprenticeship at BWC about 15 years ago, went to the mines for five years, then came back and bought into the business alongside Brad, his business partner and about 15 years his senior.
The shop started primarily in stainless. COVID took commercial kitchens down and, by Brendan's read, that market still has not properly come back, so BWC pushed harder into aluminium - 4WD canopies and trays - while holding the stainless and structural steel work. Today it covers all of it: structural steel, commercial and outdoor kitchens, canopies and trays, plate aluminium boats and marine stainless, laser-cut screens and balustrades, plus bin inserts and hangar door refurbishments for Gold Coast Airport.
Around 25 local builders are on the books, from one-man operations up to multi-million-dollar projects, serviced from Brisbane down to Ballina and Lismore.
BWC tried other systems before Factory. One was clearly set up for cabinet makers - Brendan knows a couple who use it happily. Others would have taken a thousand hours of setup before they returned anything useful, and another hundred training someone to use them. The big-manufacturing systems assume a repeat line. BWC's week is 20 open jobs for one airport customer, a boat trailer, and five things on the desk that Brendan describes as weird.
"We used about 3 or 4 different programs before, but nothing was for a fabricator. They're all for a plumber, or a leccy, or big manufacturing."
There was a second test, and it was internal. Brad is paper-based by instinct - as an apprentice, Brendan had to show him how to attach a file to an email. Brendan's read on Factory was that it was something he could get across the line with his business partner. Fabricators hate change at the best of times, and a system nobody in the shop will open is not a system.
That is the shop Factory was built for - by a family that ran a fabrication shop of their own for almost 50 years, designing the software around a shop like this one rather than the other way round. Five different jobs on the desk that nobody has built before, and a week that has to absorb them anyway.
More from the BWC floor
Boats, canopies, kitchens, screens and structural steel - one shop, one week.
Day to day on the floor
Schedules the week in the planner, colour-coded by job, across the whole crew.
Handles 20-plus open orders for a single customer and keeps them straight by purchase order.
Attaches the full structural plans to the order, so the crew has them on their phones on site.
Tracks time against jobs on the mobile app instead of paper job sheets, with a live view of who is clocked onto what.
Pulls customer contacts and job history from site, mid-call.
Compares quoted hours against actual hours - 100 allowed against 130 taken - and corrects the next quote.
