Introduction

Hi, my name is Annika, and I'm on the product team here at Fulcrum. Today I'd like to tell you about one of our newest features, Builder.

Right now, there are hundreds of pages running inside our customers' Fulcrum sites that nobody at Fulcrum built. Our customers built them simply by describing what they needed. That's Builder, and in a minute I'm going to build one in front of you.

Why We Built Builder

We built this because every shop is unique. Shops have things they do that work for them, a unique process for running jobs through the floor, tribal knowledge, and that one form they need to fill out for that one customer. It's what makes your shop yours, and it's a big part of what makes you successful.

In the past, you had two options: pay a consulting company six figures, or bend your process to fit the software. That constraint is now gone. Within Fulcrum, you can build these processes in instead of keeping them in a spreadsheet or in somebody's head. So let's build one.

Building a Late-Jobs Page

There's nothing on the page yet. Here's the full workflow. I'm going to ask Builder to show me every open job that's behind schedule, grouped by department, and include the current operation and job notes. Then I'll send that.

The Four Harnesses Behind Builder

What's happening right here is the part that matters. Builder runs the request through four harnesses, four things we taught it that are built in.

The first is manufacturing knowledge: machines, manuals, feeds and speeds. A general-purpose AI goes out to the internet for that, and sometimes it lands on the right thing and sometimes it doesn't. We make sure to point it at the right answer.

Second is Fulcrum itself: the schema, where your data lives and why, how to write it back safely, and what your permissions allow.

Third is software and design patterns. It has to actually be good at writing software and know what a good screen looks like.

Fourth is how manufacturing works as a business: bottlenecks, how to think about capacity, and how a prototyping shop versus a production-run shop should function. Without all four, you get random results. With that knowledge, you get a very powerful tool that helps you drive your business.

Reviewing the Results

And there it is. That's the data in the system right now. It gave me an overview of the late jobs at the top, some filters for viewing the data more easily, and, scrolling down, the details for each job.

Making Edits and Taking Action

This custom report is a good start, but it would be a lot better if I could take action and start addressing issues while I'm reviewing them. So I'm going to ask Builder to make a few modifications.

I want to be able to edit some fields from this report. Put an edit icon next to the due date and job notes. Add priority and make it editable. Spacing-wise, we'll need a bit more room, so due date and behind-by can share a column. I'd also like a column for owner, because I want somebody responsible for getting every late job back on track. I'll let Builder know that's a dropdown field with a list of my Fulcrum users. Finally, on design, I'd like more spacing between the blocks on the screen and blue bars instead of red. Send.

What I really want to highlight is that Builder doesn't just read your data, it writes it, so you can customize Fulcrum to your workflows.

Our updates are back, and this is looking a lot better. There's updated formatting, and scrolling down, I've got editable fields, so I can take action from this page. For example, if I knew this due date was wrong, I could update it to the correct date right here. When I do that, I'm not just updating this page in Builder. I'm updating the actual job as well.

Publishing to the Navigation

Once you have a version of the page you like, you can publish it. You can put it in the left-hand navigation so users can access it just like any other page in Fulcrum. I'm going to nest this under Production. If you want to make it visible only to certain roles, you can do that as well.

After I refresh Fulcrum, my new tool is right there in the left navigation. Nobody's jumping between tools, and Fulcrum handles the hosting, the security, and the authorization, including for ITAR.

What's Coming Next

There's more coming. Two features I'm most excited about are arriving later this month. The first is scheduling. You'll be able to schedule your page to run at a certain time every day, on a certain day of the month, or whatever cadence works for you, and have the results saved to your Builder site or emailed directly to you and your team.

The other is connecting external data sources. If you use an external accounting platform, a CRM, or anything else, you'll be able to use the API to connect it to Builder and create reports that incorporate both data sources. You could create custom integrations that read and write between Fulcrum and your accounting platform, for example. Whatever you need to do for your business, you'll be able to do it inside Builder.

So if there's something you're doing on a whiteboard right now, I'd encourage you to go tell Builder about it.