Fulcrum

06/16/2026

If AI feels urgent but you're not sure what to actually do with it, you're not behind. Our CTO Benjamin Sheats wrote about this in The Fabricator. If you're a production manager facing the "adapt or die" drumbeat and want a straight answer on where to begin, this is for you.

Even with clean data, documented processes, and specific goals, manufacturers may discover that successful AI adoption requires more than a chatbot and a good idea.

06/02/2026

Routing Auditor to close the gap between planned time and actual time. Sharper job tracking thumbnails. Pack-by-box with auto-split labels. 23k new raw materials. Dark mode in beta.

These are some of the updates we've shipped since our user conference, Connect 2026. This is just the start. Learn about the full batch of updates from Alex Troesch, VP of Product:

A first batch of feature updates shipped directly from customer conversations at Connect 2026 — job tracking, packing, purchasing, nesting, PDF cleanup, and more.

05/27/2026

Manufacturing Connected Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Hendrickson interviewed Fulcrum CEO & Founder Sunny Han to ask FAQs about AI. Read the full interview covering IT staffing needs, how to meet compliance standards such as CMMC and ITAR, and more: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05L_1l0

05/08/2026

Last week we hosted Connect 2026, our third annual user conference. 120 job shop owners, operators, and production managers from across the country came together to info-share and build.

Our CEO & Founder Sunny Han put it best: "By the end of the week, over 70% of the customers in attendance had participated in vibe coding something into existence that was below the product threshold but still incredibly useful to them. We're working hard to make that number 100% of our customers."

We laid out a network vision across both days on how to make your shop's capacity, accuracy, and expertise visible and legible to the OEMs and large vendors who want to find manufacturers like you.

Full recap at the link. Save the date for Connect 2027: April 21–23.

Fulcrum CEO & Founder Sunny Han and the team gathered job shop owners for Connect 2026, the company's third annual user conference. Learn about what they vibe coded together and how shops built tools quickly they can use daily.

04/27/2026

In the U.S. we produce nearly $200 billion annually in precision machining and another $50 billion in sheet metal fabrication. Manufacturing accounts for roughly 11% of the U.S. GDP and employs nearly 13 million people. And yet, the persistent narrative is that domestic manufacturing needs stimulus.

But in many sectors — aerospace, defense, grid expansion, semiconductor reshoring — strong demand clearly exists. The question is whether the system connecting buyers to American manufacturing capacity can operate at modern speed and scale.

Read more in CEO Sunny Han's latest piece in SupplyChainBrain:

Tariffs are a policy shortcut. Building better infrastructure is the hard work. Only one of them actually builds lasting capacity.

04/10/2026

"The closest parallel for shop owners is the introduction of CNC machines in the 1960s. At the time, many companies hesitated to shift from manual mills and lathes because they worked and were familiar tools. Computers were new, expensive and unfamiliar technology. Yet companies that adopted CNC technology quickly gained advantages in speed and precision in a way that the world had not seen before.

We are at a similar turning point now. People saying “my ERP system works” don’t yet understand that we’re in a different world now. AI allows companies to make decisions faster and more accurately by using far more data than any human can process."

Read the full piece by Tyler Buxton, Fulcrum's Head of CX & Sales, on Manufacturing.net:

Those who wait won’t just miss out on growth, they will soon start to lose loyal customers.

04/09/2026

Fulcrum now has an MCP server. AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can connect directly to your live manufacturing data.

Ask a question about a job, and it pulls the cost breakdown, the PO status, the equipment schedule. Ask what's at risk this week, and it tells you which jobs are late, which are missing materials, and which have open NCRs. Then act on it: update priorities, push due dates, advance a PO, run the Autoschedule.

And because MCP is an open standard, Fulcrum is just one of the things you can connect. Imagine checking an invoice in Fulcrum and reconciling it in QuickBooks in the same conversation. Or reading a customer email in Gmail, pulling their order status from Fulcrum, and drafting a reply with real data. That's the kind of workflow this unlocks.

Your manufacturing data just became a building block for however you want to work.

Currently in beta.

More on the MCP server →

Fulcrum's MCP server lets AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT connect directly to your manufacturing data. Search jobs, check capacity, update statuses, and work across Fulcrum and your other tools in a single conversation.

03/31/2026

One question. One conversation. Morning triaged.

No reports. No clicking through screens. Just ask Archie.

Archie in beta now → https://na2.hubs.ly/H04xlfH0

03/26/2026

Fulcrum connects sales, planning, production, and quality in one platform. Two new features in Fulcrum Control, our quality add-on, extend that connection on the quality side:

CMM imports: Upload your CSV and Fulcrum maps measurements to your bubble checkpoints automatically.

Net-Inspect FAI export: Generate AS9102 FAIRs from the job record and export directly to Net-Inspect.

Data flows in from the CMM and out to your customer. No middle steps.

See what's new → https://na2.hubs.ly/H04tY_30

03/24/2026

Do you want to know why the most connected shops will win? Read CEO & Founder Sunny Han's latest in The Fabricator.

"What’s ironic is that today, there’s actually more money in the system—more demand and bigger jobs. But the people closest to production often capture less of it because coordination still lives with the middlemen. This isn’t really about shops scaling up in the traditional sense. It’s about how they participate in the supply chain."

Shops that are able to coordinate and act as one can compete with much larger organizations for much more profitable work.