In manufacturing and fabrication firms the biggest AI wins are rarely on the machines. They're in the work around the work: quoting, job tracking, drawing control, compliance paperwork and reporting. That's where skilled people lose hours every week to copying, chasing and re-typing. An AI audit finds which of those is costing you most, and sizes it before anything is built.
These are the patterns an audit looks for. What actually applies to your business is whatever the interviews turn up.
A 12-person manufacturer spends about 4 hours per person per week on manual order-status updates and reporting: 48 hours a week across the team. An audit finds that roughly half is work an automation can do, by pulling status from existing systems and generating the report.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE · NOT A CLIENT RESULT
Built from typical SME time-sink patterns, not a specific client. 24 hours × €29 × 52 weeks ≈ €36,000. Put in your own numbers with the ROI calculator.
In a fabrication or engineering firm that usually means the owner or MD, whoever builds the quotes, the production or workshop lead, and whoever chases the paperwork. Interviews are 30–45 minutes each, on video call at times that suit the shop.
Nothing else is asked of the shop floor. The audit needs your time and existing documents, not sensitive data.
The owner or MD: what feels slow, and what it costs.
Estimating and office: how quotes, orders and admin actually flow.
Production and quality: how jobs are tracked and how the paperwork gets built.
For a small firm of roughly 10–20 people the AI audit is a fixed fee of €3,000–5,000, agreed before work begins. Manufacturing companies with 10 or more full-time staff may qualify for the Enterprise Ireland Digital Discovery Grant, which can cover 80% of a strategic consultancy engagement like this, up to a €5,000 grant, subject to Enterprise Ireland's approval. Terms change, so check current eligibility.
No. Manufacturing and engineering are the main focus, but the audit method works for any business with repeatable processes, such as quoting, orders, jobs, reporting or compliance paperwork. Very small businesses rarely have enough repeated work for an audit to pay back.
Mostly time, not data: a 30 to 45 minute interview with each person involved (leadership and the people doing the work), recorded with their permission, plus whatever process documentation already exists. Nothing sensitive is required for the audit itself. Data handling for any build is scoped and agreed separately.
You do. Anything built for your business is yours outright, with no ongoing licence fee to keep using it.
Whatever fits the problem and your existing stack. Most builds lean on Claude/Anthropic tooling, standard automation platforms, and custom software where nothing off-the-shelf fits.
The audit needs your time and existing process documents, not sensitive data. If a build needs access to your systems or data, how that's handled is scoped and agreed separately before anything is connected.
No. The audit puts a number on each opportunity using your own figures and shows the assumptions behind it, but results depend on how a change is adopted. Any example figures on this site are labelled as illustrative.
More on the full FAQ.
A free 30-minute call is enough to say whether an audit would pay back for your business. No pitch deck, nothing to prepare.