Case study · FOCO Workshop, Wirral
FOCO Workshop, a new cut-to-size panel workshop, knew boards, saws and their customers inside out, but not technology. We built their entire online side from a blank page and automated the whole order process: customers price bespoke cutting jobs instantly, pay online, and the invoice is raised in Xero without anyone touching it. We’re still building on it today.
Three manual jobs, two waits, and a chance for a typo at every hand-off.
No retyping, no chasing, no matching. The customer owns their details and the system does the rest.
The point isn’t AI. There’s no AI involved, just straightforward, dependable automation that takes the room for human error out of every order.
This was a start-up. The founders knew the panel industry inside out: cutting MDF and decor-faced chipboard to size, edge banding and CNC routing, for joiners, kitchen fitters and DIY customers. What they didn’t have was any tech, or the time to learn it while launching a business.
They needed to sell online from day one, but pricing a bespoke cutting list, with dozens of parts, different boards and edge banding on different sides, is fiddly to do by hand. No off-the-shelf shop platform can price a custom cut list, so the heart of the site had to be built, not configured.
Their factory already runs ARDIS, the industry-standard optimiser that drives the cutting machines. But putting ARDIS pricing on the website meant a separate cloud subscription, starting at £300 a month for 300 credits, with one credit per quote. Every customer just checking prices would have used up a credit, whether they ordered or not.
The order builder. Customers enter their cutting list and get a live price as they type.
The moment Stripe confirms a payment, a VAT-correct invoice is created in Xero and marked as paid. No bookkeeping step in between.
Distance to the workshop is worked out instantly and priced. Further away, it falls back to a manual quote. The owner sets the radius and rates, or switches it off, from the admin.
Anything the engine can’t price with confidence, like CNC work or panel bonding, goes to a manual quote instead of blocking the customer or guessing.
Abandoned-checkout reminders, saved quotes with a link to pick up where you left off, and order confirmations.
A machine-readable summary of the business, kept in sync with the site, so search engines and AI assistants describe it accurately.
The back office isn’t just a list of orders. The owner sees the health of the business at a glance:
Pricing, catalogue, quotes, orders, delivery rates and the blog all live in the same place, so there are no side spreadsheets.
The back office. Private figures are blurred.
Built for FOCO Workshop
At the heart of FOCO’s web app is a cutting optimiser we built just for them. Fitting parts onto a board looks like a jigsaw, but their beam saw has rules a jigsaw doesn’t, and every instant quote has to respect all of them.
Every cut runs edge to edge. No corners, no islands.
Each cut loses 4.4mm to the saw blade.
Two edges are squared off, so the usable board is smaller than the sheet.
Door fronts and matching panels are never rotated just to fit.
A strip thinner than the blade isn’t a usable offcut.
By size, by length, and in matching groups, the way a real job is cut.
Two strategies, including the row-by-row style the workshop’s own software uses.
Empty the lightest board into the gaps, and join offcuts that are really one piece.
Fewest boards wins, then the biggest reusable offcut.
We check board count because that’s what sets FOCO’s price. Every change we make is re-run against all 14 of their jobs before it goes live.
Every online order lands in Xero correctly, with VAT and discounts applied, and is marked as paid.
Customers enter their own details and cutting lists, so nothing is retyped between order, payment and accounts.
Bespoke cutting jobs that used to need a person to quote can now be priced and paid for online, any time.
At least £3,600 a year avoided on ARDIS cloud credits, with no cap on quotes.
After a full audit-and-fix pass, including discoverability in AI search.
Know your industry but not your tech? That’s where we come in.
Book a free chat