How to Automate Steelhead Technologies

Steelhead put the tank line and its paperwork in one login

A finishing shop never owns the parts on its racks. They arrive from another company, go through a line of tanks or an oven, and leave with a document saying what was done and to which standard. Powder coating, plating, anodising and heat treat all work that way, and in each the value is the process plus the proof of it.

Steelhead Technologies is the system those shops run on. It is cloud software written for job shops and finishers rather than adapted from a general manufacturing package, and it holds quoting and order entry, scheduling, production, inventory, job costing and invoicing in one login. Specifications and certifications live in the same database as the order, so a certificate is produced from what the shop recorded rather than assembled afterwards.

Its Scanner Line reads parts through the shop and records the time spent in every tank. For a shop holding Nadcap or working to aerospace requirements, that record is not admin. It is the product.

A rack of parts waits on paperwork from four other companies

The line itself is the part a finisher controls. What holds a job up is nearly always somewhere else.

A batch cannot be certified until the salt spray result comes back, and the outside test lab posts it to its own site without telling anybody. A drum of chemistry arrives and its certificate of analysis is on the supplier's portal, behind a login the plating room has never had. A customer revises the finish specification you are approved to and publishes it rather than emailing anyone, so the shop works to a sheet that changed in March. The disposal facility still has the signed copy of last month's waste manifest.

None of it is hard. It is six or seven websites, each with its own password, and the shop usually learns that one of them moved when a rack is already standing on the floor with nowhere to go.

Steelhead Technologies

Certificates complete before shipping asks Outside lab results collected as they post and matched to the lot and the order waiting on them, so nothing gets chased at the loading dock.

Chemistry filed with its paperwork Certificates of analysis and safety data revisions pulled from each supplier's portal and set against the bath and the drum they belong to.

Spec revisions found the week they change Customer quality portals and approval records read on a schedule, so a superseded finish specification is caught long before an auditor finds it.

Watch Tower sees every part inside the building

Steelhead is strong on the half of this it can see, and a shop that has not switched all of it on should start there.

The Watch Tower is a live view of every active part in the plant, filtered by customer, treatment, process step, deadline or whether the job has been invoiced yet, which is as close as a finisher gets to seeing where the money is standing. Sonar answers questions off the shop's own data about rework, margin and operator productivity, and its Weekly Ping mails a trend summary out on a schedule. Job costing runs on scanned tank times rather than an estimate, and certificates come out of the specification record rather than a document somebody edits.

Every one of those reads the shop's own database, and that is the boundary. The Watch Tower can show a part standing at a process step. It cannot show that the reason it is standing there is a test result sitting unread on a laboratory's website. The lab, the chemical supplier, the customer's quality portal and the disposal facility all keep their own sites, and none was ever handed a way in.

Test results can arrive attached to the lot

The order already has a place for every one of these.

Salt spray, adhesion and thickness results collected from the test lab's own page as they post, matched to the lot and the order waiting on them, so the certificate is complete before shipping asks. Certificates of analysis for each drum of chemistry pulled off the supplier's portal and filed against the bath it went into. Current price and lead time on the chemistries you actually buy, read before you reorder rather than after.

Then the failures that stay quiet. A customer's quality portal watched for revisions to the finish specification you are approved to, because three months of work against a superseded revision is a recall rather than a mistake. Approval and accreditation status checked at the body that issued it, so a lapse is found by you and not an auditor. Waste manifests followed to the disposal facility until the signed copy is back.

The line is easy to draw. Opening a site, reading it and setting it beside the order runs with nobody watching. Signing a certificate of conformity, or telling a customer their parts are late, stays with a person.

Reading other companies' portals was never a finisher's trade

Six logins is a real hour of somebody's morning, and not one a plating shop hires for.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in exactly as your office is. It opens the test lab's results page, a chemical supplier's portal, a customer's quality site or a carrier's tracking, reads what is there, and sets it beside the orders Steelhead already holds.

It runs on your schedule inside your own private environment, a run can be limited to an explicit list of domains, and you can watch one and stop it. Anything that becomes a certificate, or that reaches a customer, is prepared and waits for the person whose name goes on it. Each workflow below names the sites it opens.