Metro Detroit is thousands of suppliers, machine shops and logistics companies feeding the automotive chain. Most of them run on software that was specified when their largest customer asked for it, and has not been touched since.
A stamping supplier gets forty RFQs a month, each with drawings, tolerances and a customer-specific format. One estimator prices them in a spreadsheet built by someone who left in 2019, and turnaround is three to five days. The competitor quoting in one day is winning the marginal jobs. The fix is not a new ERP: it is capturing the estimator's actual logic into something that produces a first-pass number in an hour, with the estimator reviewing rather than building from scratch. That project pays for itself in the first quarter it wins a job that would have gone elsewhere.
RFQs arrive with drawings and tolerances, and someone prices them by hand with a spreadsheet built years ago. Shops that shorten that cycle win work from shops that do not.
The requirement usually comes down from the customer, not from a strategy meeting. Meeting it without rebuilding your whole operation is the actual problem.
Production, scrap and downtime live on paper or in a machine nobody exports from. The gap between the floor and the numbers management sees is where margin disappears.
The metro economy is layered: OEMs at the top, then tiers of suppliers, tooling shops, logistics and the professional services around them. That structure matters technically, because a tier-two supplier does not choose its own integration standards, it inherits them from the customer above.
Detroit has plenty of agencies serving consumer brands and far fewer that understand a manufacturing operation. If your problem sounds like ERP and traceability rather than a redesign, the shortlist gets narrow fast.
The companies that call us here are usually tier-two or tier-three suppliers between forty and three hundred people, profitable, with a plant manager who knows exactly what is broken and a president who has been quoted an ERP replacement twice and walked away both times. They are not looking for digital transformation. They want the quoting cycle shorter and the customer portal satisfied without a two-year project.
Most of the supplier base is not in Detroit proper. Warren, Sterling Heights and the Macomb County corridor hold a large share of the tooling and stamping shops, Auburn Hills and Troy skew toward engineering and corporate, and Dearborn carries its own gravity. A vendor who assumes the whole metro behaves the same tends to misjudge who they are talking to.
Also worth a look: what we do by industry, which goes deeper than this page on the specifics of each sector.
Usually yes, and it is a common starting point. Those requirements are specific and non-negotiable, so we build to them rather than around them. What we do not recommend is replacing a working ERP to satisfy one customer portal: the integration layer is almost always cheaper and less disruptive.
Yes, that is how every engagement runs. We are in Costa Rica, on Central time, so the overlap covers your whole workday. Compared to a team ten time zones away, that difference shows up in how fast decisions get made rather than in a status report.
With a call about where the work is leaking, not about technology. If what you need is a setting in a tool you already pay for, we say so. If it is a build, you get a proposal with defined deliverables and a fixed price for the work.
Tell us where the work is leaking. If the fix is something you can do without hiring anyone, we'll say that on the call.
Tell us what you need and we'll get back to you. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Salomon Web Services