Free up your team for the work
that actually moves the business.
We're forward-deployed engineers — we fly to your site, embed with your team, and find the workflows eating their day: quoting, data entry, vendor follow-ups, status chasing. Then we ship the tools that hand those hours back, so your people spend them on the work only they can do. New capacity for high-leverage work, without a new hire.
We don't deliver software. We deliver hours back to your best people.
A forward-deployed engineer embeds with your team for a week. They watch the workflows eating each person's day. They ship the tool that takes that work off the plate. Then they keep finding the next one. Here's what that does for three roles we see again and again.
Representative roles — composited from real engagements, details changed.
- Matt · Inside sales repPrecision parts manufacturer · 38 employeesEating their day
“Half my day is building quotes — pulling specs off a CAD file, cross-checking the price list, formatting the PDF, sending it. By the time I get back to the customer, two other shops have already quoted.”
What we shippedA quoting tool we built for him in 9 days- Drag-in a CAD spec — it parses the part and pulls his catalog match.
- Applies his customer-tier pricing rules automatically.
- Branded quote PDF in the customer’s inbox in under 4 minutes.
Capacity returnedWhat Matt does with the hours back- Calling top-30 accounts personally, every week.
- Following up on the deals he was about to lose to faster competitors.
- Building real rapport on-site at the customer instead of formatting PDFs.
- Renée · Strategic buyerIndustrial distributor · $42M revenueEating their day
“Every RFQ means thirty vendor emails, replies trickling in over a week, then me re-keying everything into a spreadsheet just to compare. The deal’s done before procurement even has the data.”
What we shippedAn RFQ agent we deployed in two weeks- Fires structured RFQs to every qualified vendor on the parts list.
- Parses replies (PDFs, email, portals) into one normalized ranked table.
- Auto-nudges late vendors and flags pricing outliers for review.
Capacity returnedWhat Renée does with the hours back- Negotiating tier-1 contracts instead of chasing tier-3 replies.
- Visiting key vendors on-site to re-bid annual programs.
- Resurrecting two dormant suppliers nobody had time to revisit.
- Dave · Service operations managerField service co. · 22 techs across 3 statesEating their day
“I call my techs three times a day to ask if the job’s closed. Then I re-enter that into the ERP by hand. By the time invoicing sees it, the customer’s already 5 days past the work being done.”
What we shippedA field-tech app + ERP sync we shipped in 3 weeks- Tech closes the job from their phone — photos, parts, signature.
- Status, parts used, and labor hours auto-sync to the ERP and dispatch board.
- Invoice fires within the hour, not the week.
Capacity returnedWhat Dave does with the hours back- Booking next month’s schedule proactively instead of reactively.
- Calling customers before they call complaining.
- Sitting with the new tech on ride-alongs — coaching, not chasing.
Three roles. Same pattern. There's a version of this for every seat in your business — we just have to come sit next to them for a week.
What would yours look like?You know the bottleneck. Our engineers come find the next three.
Six patterns our forward-deployed engineers walk into at nearly every mid-size industrial team. If one of these sounds like your Tuesday, there's a system we'd build for you in week two. Click in to see what it looks like.
- 01Quotes take half a day and deals cool off while you build one.Quoting software your reps actually use
- 02Your team is calling the warehouse to check stock.Real-time inventory across every location
- 03Forty vendors to source from and your buyer is drowning in email.Automated RFQs + ranked comparison in days
- 04Your best operator is retiring and nobody else knows the system.Their knowledge, shipped as software your team owns
- 05You run on an AS/400, 2008-era SAP, or a portal with no API.Agents that drive the systems you already have
- 06Large buyers are building procurement agents and your catalog is a PDF.AI-ready catalogs so you show up when they search
Core systems, shaped to how you already work.
Five operational systems ship with every retainer. Not templates you configure — tools we build to match the language, handoffs, and quirks of your business. Connected to each other. Running on your infrastructure. Owned by you.
asset management
infrastructure
you ask for
First we capture your context.
The part no vendor gets to see — how work actually gets done, where handoffs break, which tools people route around. Before we build anything, we run our field diagnostic on your company: every person, operator to COO, fifteen minutes on their phone. That's what we build from.
We start on the floor, not in the boardroom.
Most surveys ask the same question at every level. We don't. We start with the people closest to the work and carry their answers up the chain — each pass informed by what the rung below said. You get a ranked shortlist of what's actually slowing you down, with direct quotes and hour-per-week costs.
- 01The floorOperators, techs, quality, maintenance. Ground truth — the jobs, handoffs, and workarounds that make up actual work.
- 02Supervisors & leadsWhere ground truth diverges from the reported picture. Which bottlenecks are known-and-accepted vs. invisible from below.
- 03Plant & functional leadersStructural causes — ownership gaps, cross-department overhead — that no single line can see or solve on its own.
- 04The executiveThe final map. Strategy on top, ground truth underneath, every line traceable to a real voice.
What you're seeing · three people on the floor all report the same bottleneck — waiting on one manager's approval. Their supervisor and plant manager confirm it when asked. Two tools (the ERP and a paper approval form) are entangled in it. That pattern becomes one finding in the report.
Show up. Capture. Build. Stay.
Agencies scope, bill, and leave. Employees take years to get the context we capture in weeks. Our forward-deployed engineers do neither — they fly in, sit on your ops calls and sales calls, learn your business the way your best operator knows it, then ship. Every fix reveals the next one, and we're already on it.
Process mining
Proprietary tools surface where time and money are leaking. Workflows mapped end-to-end, not by gut feel.
Embed & learn
Site visits. Ride-alongs. We sit on your ops calls, sales calls, service calls. The more context, the more leverage.
Assessment
What's broken, what's working, who's involved, what you already run — and how realistic adoption actually is.
Build & deploy
Highest-impact fixes first. Some ship in a week. Everything validated with your team before it goes live.
Unlimited requests
Anyone on your team can email us anything. We respond with a timeline and build. No scoping calls, no change orders.
Keep finding
We stay embedded, so we keep seeing new opportunities. Every fix reveals the next. We bring you problems to solve.
First 30 days at HUB MFG.
HUB MFG needed a better way to quote custom parts, a website that actually showed what they do, and faster vendor pricing — without slowing down their team. Here's what we shipped in the first month.
Three tools deployed.
One month. Zero downtime.
We embedded with their team week one — site visit, ops shadowing, reviewing their quoting backlog. By week two we had a 3D quoting system in production. By week four, a rebuilt website and automated vendor pricing that eliminated the email-tag loop entirely.
It feels like a cheat code. We had no idea we could have tools like this built this fast — now we can't imagine running without them.
Real tools built through retainer requests.
Every one of these started as a request on a client's board. Some took days, some took weeks — all of them are running in production right now.
Self-learning
technical database
Engineering knowledge — searchable, forever.
Analyzed 14,000 technical documents and 3 years of email threads. Continuously ingests new Q&A so tribal knowledge never leaves.
Customer service
task ledger
Every task, response time, and trend — automatic.
Auto-categorizes service emails, tracks response times by category, surfaces trends for leadership. No manual logging.
Sales route
planner
Reps plan their day in 2 minutes, not 20.
Maps daily routes by lead proximity, priority score, and last-contact date. Reps hit highest-value stops first.
Prospect
microsites
Landing pages that make top accounts feel like your only customer.
Personalized mini-sites for the 50 highest-value targets — tailored to industry, pain points, and buying signals.
Automated
bid tracker
Never lose track of an open bid again.
Tracks every open RFQ, bid status, follow-up dates, and win/loss outcomes. Auto-reminds reps. Leadership sees the full pipeline.
Vendor scorecard
dashboard
Rate every supplier on delivery, quality, cost.
Pulls PO, receiving, and quality data to score vendors. Surfaces underperformers. Procurement negotiates from data.
Parts cross-
reference tool
Find the right part number across makers in seconds.
Searchable cross-reference across 6 manufacturers and 40,000+ part numbers. Used dozens of times per day.
Inventory reorder
automation
Reorders fire when stock hits the threshold.
Configurable reorder points per SKU. When stock drops below threshold, a PO draft is generated and routed for approval.
LLM-ready
product catalog
When the buyer's AI hunts suppliers, you show up.
Restructured 40,000+ SKUs into semantic formats — specs, compatibility, certifications, pricing — for AI procurement agents.
Automated
pricing API
First to respond wins — even when the buyer is a bot.
REST endpoints so procurement systems query real-time pricing and availability, generate quotes, place orders. Under 200ms.
Built for industrial SMBs — $5M to $100M in revenue.
We speak the language of quoting, lead times, bills of material, and trade shows. Most of our clients never had in-house developers. They don't need to start now.
Manufacturing
- Quoting is an Excel sheet emailed as PDF
- Reps hunt leads instead of selling
- Best engineer retired with the knowledge
- Website hasn't changed since before COVID
Industrial distribution
- Territory coverage based on memory
- Stock lookups mean calling the warehouse
- Growth depends on trade shows & referrals
- Every SaaS wants a 12-month contract
Field service
- Scheduling lives on a whiteboard
- Customer history walks out when techs leave
- Actual vs. quoted hours is unknown
- Invoicing happens days after the job
Procurement & ops
- Inventory lives in untrusted spreadsheets
- Stockouts are discovered, not predicted
- Approvals are email chains that get lost
- ERP is 15 years old and untouched
Less than one hire. More than a department.
The cheapest way to ship software used to be hiring a team or scoping with an agency. AI changed that math. One monthly retainer gives you engineers, designers, and strategists — deploying core systems, building custom tools, automating workflows. No per-project fees, no change orders, no limits.
| Cirql retainer | Full-time hire | Traditional agency | Freelancers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | Less than one hire | $8K–$15K+ loaded | $10K–$50K / project | $5K–$20K / project |
| Scope | Unlimited requests | One person, one skill | Scoped per project | Scoped per project |
| Speed | Days to weeks | Weeks to months | Weeks to months | Unpredictable |
| Team | Full team — eng, design, strategy | Single person | Rotates per project | Single person |
| Context | Embedded in your ops | Learns over months | Gets a brief | Gets a brief |
| Proactive | We find problems for you | Works on what they're told | Delivers what's scoped | Delivers what's scoped |
| Ownership | You own everything | You own everything | Varies by contract | Varies by contract |
Tell us what's eating your team's day. We'll send an engineer.
A 30-minute call. Bring the workflow that's been bugging you for a year. We'll tell you whether a forward-deployed engineer should be on a plane next week, what we'd build first, and what hours it would hand back to your team. If there's no fit, we'll say so — no pitch deck, no follow-up sequence.
Tell us what's broken. We'll tell you what's possible.
Two minutes of typing. You get a short write-up back — what's worth building, what isn't, and what it would take. No pitch deck, no follow-up sequence. We review every submission within 24 hours.