Built for Production Volume

The Production Framing Problem

Production framing is a throughput problem. You're not optimizing one frame at a time — you're running dozens of jobs daily, batched by profile, cut by a crew that needs clear instructions and no ambiguity. The bottleneck isn't the saw. It's getting clean, accurate cut lists into the hands of the people doing the cutting, fast enough to keep up with order volume.

Most shops at production scale are still relying on some combination of POS exports, spreadsheets, and manual re-entry. Cut lists get transcribed from the order screen onto paper. Kerf gets approximated. Remnants get eyeballed. At low volume, these inefficiencies are background noise. At high volume, they're the difference between running at a margin and burning it. A single wrong kerf assumption across 40 jobs a day adds up to real moulding waste, repeated every day.

The Math at Production Scale

Production shops spend a wide range on moulding each month — the bigger the spend, the more even a few percentage points of recovered waste matters. Industry discussions and our own early-testing observations put manual moulding waste in the 15–25% range, with optimized shops landing closer to 8–12%. Several percentage points of recovery, multiplied by a production-scale moulding budget, adds up over a year. Our waste calculator can help you put a real number on it for your shop.

The win compounds with batch size. A hotel contract that needs 200 frames in a specific profile across 20 sizes can consume thousands of dollars of moulding alone. Optimization across the whole batch — rather than cutting one frame at a time — means fewer fresh sticks pulled and more remnants put back to work. The savings show up per job and again at month-end on the dashboard.

And that's ignoring labor. Manual cut planning for a 200-frame batch takes hours of a skilled framer's time. Algorithmic optimization takes seconds. That labor gets redirected to actually cutting and joining — which is where throughput comes from.

What RailChop Does Differently

RailChop handles the full intake-to-cut-ticket workflow. Import directly from your POS export as a CSV, TSV, or XLSX file — the app auto-maps your column headers so there's no manual column assignment the first time. For shops receiving handwritten work orders or non-standard formats, AI Scan reads the image and extracts customers, dimensions, quantities, and profile names. Multiple profiles on the same page get matched to separate cutting groups automatically, so jobs don't get cross-contaminated during planning.

Once jobs are in, the optimizer runs across all of them simultaneously — not one by one. It factors remnant inventory, stock lengths, cost per foot, and kerf allowance for every profile in the batch. The output is a complete cut plan with per-stick assignments, waste tracking, and a PDF cut ticket you can print for each station. Workers mark sticks complete as they finish; the app tracks progress across the batch in real time. The shop dashboard gives you waste rate, cost per frame, material efficiency, and low-stock alerts — the numbers you need to manage a production floor, not just execute cuts.

See the cut optimizer, cut list import, and the shop dashboard.

Import: Where Production Shops Save the Most Time

Most production orders arrive as some form of list — a POS export, a spreadsheet from the interior designer, a CSV from the online order system. Manually typing each job into your cut planner is pure overhead. Ten minutes per batch, 30 batches per week, is five hours of work that isn't cutting.

RailChop's cut list import (Business tier) handles CSV, TSV, and XLSX files natively. You drop the file, the app reads the headers, auto-maps columns (customer, width, height, quantity, profile), and presents a review screen where you can verify before adding to the batch. Combined dimension formats like "16 x 20" in a single column get parsed correctly. Fractions get converted to decimals. Profile names get matched against your library (and offered as new profiles if they're not recognized).

The same review screen lets you fix any issues — rename a profile, reassign a customer, edit a dimension — before committing to the batch. Nothing hits your cut plan without passing through this review. And once reviewed, the whole batch flows to the optimizer in one action.

AI Scan: For the Orders That Aren't Already Digital

Production shops often receive orders in formats that aren't clean CSVs. Handwritten work orders from the sales team. Scanned PDFs from the design firm. Custom order forms from a repeat client. Getting these into a cut plan usually means manual re-entry — error-prone and time-consuming.

AI Scan reads these. Snap a photo of the handwritten work order (or import a PDF page), and RailChop extracts customer names, dimensions, quantities, and profile names. The AI handles messy handwriting, non-standard formats, and ambiguous shortcuts. Multi-profile orders get per-job matching: different jobs on the same page can map to different profiles, and the scan-confirm screen groups jobs by profile for review.

The Business tier includes 300 AI scans per month, which fits the typical production shop's intake of non-digital work orders. Shops with higher scan volumes can contact us for enterprise pricing.

Live Progress Tracking

Production floors need visibility. Which sticks are done? Which are in progress? Which are waiting? On a 50-frame batch with three saws and two workers, the answer isn't always obvious.

RailChop tracks progress per stick. As each worker marks a stick complete (a tap on the app), the batch progress updates. The home screen shows which batches have active sticks remaining. The cut plan view shows per-stick status. When the last stick of a batch is marked complete, the batch auto-completes and shows the post-complete sheet for PDF export or adding more work.

This isn't a replacement for a production management system. It's a shop-floor tracker that keeps everyone on the same page during the cutting phase without requiring anyone to check a separate system.

The Shop Dashboard: KPIs That Matter

Production shops run on metrics. Waste rate, cost per frame, material efficiency, optimization score, throughput. The Business tier's shop dashboard tracks all of these automatically, updated as each batch completes.

Hero metric: your current month's optimization rate, with a sparkline showing the trend. Below it, a KPI strip with jobs-completed, waste-percentage, cost-per-frame, and scrap-cost-saved. Below that, a waste trend chart showing how waste has moved over the last 30, 60, or 90 days. A materials breakdown by profile shows which mouldings you're using most, and which have the highest waste rates (so you can target them for improvement).

Monthly PDF shop reports are exportable for management review. CSV exports of material usage, waste trends, and stock inventory are available for any external analysis. This is the visibility production managers have been asking for — without requiring them to build it themselves in a spreadsheet.

Remnant Tracking at Production Scale

Production shops generate a lot of remnants. A typical 120" stick cut for a production batch can leave 15–45" of usable offcut. Across 20 sticks per day, that's 300–900" of potential remnant material — typically 25–75 feet per day. Without tracking, 60%+ of that ends up as waste because nobody remembers which profile a remnant is from or when it was cut.

RailChop tags every remnant to its profile automatically. Every optimization run considers existing remnants alongside fresh stock, factoring them in when they genuinely improve the cut plan. Remnant aging is configurable per shop — set it to 30 days, 60 days, whatever matches your turnover. Older remnants get treated as candidates to clear in upcoming cut plans. If they can't be used, you can write them off intentionally rather than discovering two years later that the back shelf is full of $3,000 of dead stock.

Pricing: Built for Production Throughput

The Business tier is $24.99/month, or $209.99/year (saving 30% on the annual plan). That covers unlimited profiles, unlimited batches, unlimited jobs per batch, 300 AI scans per month, cut list import, and the shop dashboard. For most production shops, the recovered material from a single month of optimized batches more than covers the subscription — the bigger your moulding spend, the faster the math works in your favor.

Shops running higher scan volumes or needing enterprise features can reach out via help@railchop.com for tailored pricing. Everything in the standard Business tier works at any volume.