Production-grade AI for manufacturers. Right on the first pass.

Most AI pilots die in a month because they are built like demos. FirstPass Systems builds automation the way plants build product: instrumented, measured, designed for recovery — engineered by a manufacturing engineer whose last scheduling tool went from idea to adopted on a live production floor in two days, not a dev shop learning what a traveler is.

Book a free 30-minute working session No pitch deck. Two or three specific ideas for your operation and a live demo of a working system.

We automate the paperwork layer of manufacturing

Everywhere a person retypes, chases, or cross-checks a document, there are hours to recover. One engine — read the messy document, validate it, compute, route it, never lose one — pointed at the pains below. Your plant picks which one pays first.

Production scheduling

Setup-aware job sequencing that recovers changeover hours and catches "same part, released tomorrow" before the teardown happens.

Quoting and estimating

RFQ PDFs become draft quotes with comparable-job history in hours, not days. Faster quotes win more bids.

Order entry

Customer POs in fifty formats, read and validated against the quote before they ever touch your ERP.

First-piece and job release

An approved first piece explodes into routed feeder-line sub-jobs with material checks — and a sheet the control plan rejects releases nothing.

Downtime and maintenance

Root-cause summaries and repeat-offender detection mined from the downtime logs and CMMS notes nobody has time to read.

Voice capture on the floor

The team lead says what happened once — it becomes a structured downtime record, scrap entry, and work order. On-premises speech, tuned to your machine names. See the offering.

Change control and audit prep

ECN propagation checks and continuously assembled audit evidence, so certification season stops being a fire drill.

Case studies

Proof, not promises. Real systems, real production floors, and one fully transparent reference build you can watch run live.

Live production floor

Recovering changeover hours on a multi-line converting operation

Six converting lines, scheduled by hand every morning, kept tearing down setups only to rebuild them a day later for identical parts sitting in the ERP. A FirstPass sequencing engine now reads the same daily exports the plant already produces and hands back an optimized schedule — with the floor team's own changeover physics encoded, priority customers pulled forward, and printed run sheets the crew already knows how to use.

14.5 hrsof changeover time recovered in the first two weeks of live operation, measured
2 daysfrom idea to adopted on the plant floor
11pending ERP orders caught on day one matching setups already running
Read the case study (PDF)
Live production floor

Catching material shortages before the line does

The same converting operation, a new failure mode: lines share substrate rolls, and a heavy run on one line quietly consumed the material other lines needed — discovered at an empty rack, after the setup was built. The ERP knew the quantities all along but would not export them. FirstPass joined a standard shortage report the plant already produced to the schedule by work-order number, drained on-hand through every line's run order, and flagged the exact job that runs each substrate dry — before the floor finds out.

1 in 3substrates short against open demand on the first live run — ten jobs flagged as the ones that hit the wall
Same dayfrom the floor describing the problem to the material-aware schedule running on real data
0ERP integration — two standard reports the plant already produced, nothing installed
Read the case study (PDF)
Reliability engineering

An autonomous AI system that runs like a production line

A fully autonomous research and reporting system in continuous production since June 2026 — an AI agent driving a live application on a schedule, unattended, with every failure mode found in production met with a countermeasure: watchdogs, verified delivery, tolerant parsing, alerts instead of silence.

100%eventual delivery across an audited 28-run window
29%first-attempt upstream failures absorbed by design, zero silent losses
43production runs cost-measured across three AI model tiers
Read the case study (PDF)
Founder build, fully measured

Replacing a cloud dictation product in three days — and benchmarking it

The founder's own dictation ran double his subscription's weekly word cap, and every spoken word went to a vendor's cloud. FirstPass built a fully on-device replacement in three days — local speech recognition, local AI cleanup, audio discarded at transcription — then benchmarked it against the incumbent using the incumbent's own latency logs across 574 dictations. The honest result, both directions, is in the PDF.

3 daysfrom word cap to a working replacement in daily use
~1.3 sflat response at any dictation length — a 54-second dictation waits 1.3 s
$0per month, no word limits, no audio leaving the machine
Read the case study (PDF)
Watch it run live

Reference build: first-piece sheet to feeder-line sub-jobs

A complete working system on a fictional plant with fully synthetic data — built so you can watch a FirstPass system work, failure handling and all, before spending a dollar. Six messy first-piece sheets in; routed sub-jobs, shortage flags, and printable travelers out. The closer: a sheet the inspector accepted that the control plan rejects — held, with zero downstream jobs released. Scrap that never happened.

19sub-jobs released across five work centers from six sheets
2material shortages caught at release time, exact purchase quantities suggested
3 minto watch the full demonstration run live
Read the reference build (PDF)

Voice capture for the plant floor

Floor data dies on the walk to the keyboard: the operator tells the team lead, the team lead types a summary of a summary an hour later, and the downtime code says "OTHER". Voice capture lets the person who was standing there say it once — and it becomes a structured record: machine, reason code, downtime, scrap, and a work order in your maintenance system.

On your floor, not in a cloud

A palm-sized compute appliance in your IT closet does all speech processing. No audio leaves the building. Works with no internet at all — and it is tuned to your machine names, part numbers, and reason codes, spoken over plant noise.

Capture points are just browsers

Any line PC you already own becomes a capture station with an inexpensive microphone; rugged glove-friendly tablets go where no PC lives. Push to talk, review the parsed record, tap Confirm. A person approves every record.

Lands in your systems

Day one: records to your network share and email-to-work-order — native in most modern CMMS platforms, including Maximo's built-in E-mail Listener. Direct API and staging-table integration as a scoped module when IT is ready.

Pilot on one line: $5,000 fixed, two to three weeks, appliance included, measured before/after report. Expansion per line with volume pricing, and a monthly support tier that keeps the vocabulary and models current as your plant changes.

Offering and pricing (PDF) The engine behind it: measured case study (PDF)

How an engagement works

You never buy on faith. Every step, you have already seen the previous step work.

Free working session — 30 minutes, no commitment

We come with two or three specific ideas for your operation and a live demo of a working agent. If nothing fits, you have lost half an hour and gained a second opinion.

Pilot build — fixed scope, about two weeks

A working system on your real data — a folder of exports is enough; no ERP access needed. You keep it whether or not we go further. Priced so a plant manager can approve it.

Production build — fixed bid, 4 to 8 weeks

The pilot hardened into a production system on your infrastructure: read-only, scoped access your IT defines, every run logged and verified, failures alerted — never silent.

Managed operations — monthly

We watch the instruments, tune the system, and extend it as your operation changes. AI model usage bills directly to your own account — your data, your dashboards, your terms.

What you keep

Every FirstPass build is delivered as yours: documented source code, a plain-English runbook, and the logs to prove what it does. It runs on your hardware, under your accounts — no license, no lock-in, no dependence on us. Most clients keep us on monthly to watch the alerts, tune as production changes, and build the next thing — but that’s a choice you re-make every month, because the work earns it. Not because you’re stuck.

Anthony Ford, founder of FirstPass Systems
Anthony Ford, founder

Who you are working with

FirstPass Systems is Anthony Ford — a manufacturing engineer in central Indiana with day-job experience in line support, capital upgrades, maintenance, and quality at a global manufacturer.

The name is the standard: first-pass yield. Systems that work the first time and keep working — because they are engineered like a production line, with watchdogs, verified delivery, and holds that fire the same way every time. Deterministic where it must be right; AI where judgment lives. Your data stays on your infrastructure, under your own accounts and terms.

Based near Indianapolis — on your floor in under an hour across central Indiana.

Start with the free working session

Email a sentence about your operation and the paperwork that eats the most hours. You will get back two or three concrete automation ideas and times for a 30-minute call — usually within one business day.

anthony.ford@firstpasssystems.com