Business automation in Camborne & Redruth.
Cornwall’s industrial centre, and the easiest place in the county to build software for. Engineering firms already think in documented process, which removes most of the difficulty before we start.
Autaimate builds business automation and custom software for Camborne and Redruth businesses, from a studio in St Austell. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. You own the code.
An engineering town that thinks in process
Camborne and Redruth carry the legacy of Cornish mining, and with it an engineering and manufacturing base the rest of the county does not have. Fabrication, precision engineering, plant maintenance, electrical contracting, and the industrial estates that house them.
These businesses are unusually good to build software for, and the reason is cultural rather than technical. An engineering firm already thinks in terms of process, tolerance and documented procedure. When we ask what actually happens, we get a clear answer instead of a shrug — and that is most of the difficulty in this work removed before it begins.
What they generally lack is not understanding but the join. Job cards on paper, quality records in one system, certification in another, and somebody re-keying between all three. The process is well understood and well run; it simply was never built into anything, because the software that would do it does not exist at this scale.
Where the join is missing
Four builds that tend to be small, cheap and disproportionately valuable in an engineering business.
Quality and certification records
Traceability produced as a by-product of the work rather than assembled at the end of the week. Audit logging on every change, with the evidence trail intact and dated when a customer or an auditor asks for it.
Job cards and works orders
What was made, by whom, to which specification, with which materials. Built to fit your actual routing rather than a generic manufacturing template that assumes a factory ten times the size.
Estimating
The spreadsheet one estimator built and nobody else fully understands. Turned into a proper tool with the logic documented and visible, so it survives that person retiring — which is a real business risk, not a hypothetical one.
Planned maintenance
Schedules that trigger themselves and record their own completion, removing the failure mode where the maintenance plan lives in one person’s head and a diary.
Talking to someone who has been on site
Mick Stevenson spent four decades in UK construction and trades before writing any software. In an engineering town that is worth stating plainly, because the usual experience of commissioning software is explaining your process three times to somebody who has never seen a workshop.
It also means the conversation starts in the right place. An engineering firm can describe its process precisely, and what it needs is not a discovery workshop but somebody who can turn that description into something that works on the shop floor. Half a day walking the routing is usually enough.
Autaimate is based in St Austell, so Camborne and Redruth are a short run down the A30. For anything involving the shop floor, being there is not a courtesy — it is where the design decisions actually get made.
Camborne & Redruth questions
We already run an ERP. Is a custom build worth it? +
Often the useful build is not a replacement but the join — the part the ERP does not do, that somebody is currently doing by hand between two screens. Those builds are small, cheap and high value. If reconfiguring what you already pay for would fix it, we will tell you that instead and lose the commission.
Can it produce the records our customers audit? +
Yes, and that is usually the strongest reason to build. Audit logging on every state-changing operation, dated and attributed entries, and evidence produced as a by-product of the work rather than reconstructed afterwards. What the record must contain comes from your customers and your standards — we build to that, we do not invent it.
What does it cost? +
Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500. For an engineering business the comparison worth making is against the estimator or the quality manager spending a day a week on paperwork that a tool would produce automatically.
Will it work on the shop floor, not just in the office? +
That is the test that matters. If it takes more than a few taps with oily hands, it will not get used and the paper will come back within a fortnight. Building for people actually doing the work rather than the person specifying it is the whole point.
Our estimator is retiring and it is all in his head. Can you help? +
That is one of the clearest cases for a build we see. Getting the logic out of one person and into a documented tool is genuinely urgent work, and it is far easier to do while they are still there to explain it than afterwards.
Do we own it? +
Yes. The repository transfers on delivery with documentation and deployment configuration. For a business that already understands the value of drawings and specifications, that should not need explaining.
Walk us through the routing.
Half a day on the shop floor tells us more than a specification document ever will, and it is usually enough to scope and price the whole build.