Engine & Transmission Builders
When the work is measured in thousandths, your tracking can't run on sticky notes and memory.
Engine and transmission building is precision work measured in thousandths — and a lot of it shows up as a bare block, a core, or a box of heads shipped in from across the country. From the moment a part hits your bench to the moment it ships back, every core has to be tracked, every spec recorded, and every step signed off. MSA was built to run a shop like that.
Tag every core the moment it hits the bench
A block, a set of heads, a crank — in this business the work often shows up as a bare core shipped in with little more than a name on the box. QR code tagging means you print a label and put it on the part the second it arrives. From then on anyone can scan it to pull up the job, the specs, and exactly where that core is in your process — so there's never a question about which bare block on the shelf belongs to which customer.
Organize the floor into stages
Teardown, inspection, machining, assembly, dyno, ship. Set up a zone for each stage of your process and move jobs across the board as the work moves through the shop. Sort the work into departments so a machinist and an assembler each see only what's theirs, and tell at a glance what's waiting, what's in progress, and what's ready to go out.
Build your repeatable processes once
A balanced rotating assembly, a stage-2 head package, a common rebuild combination — the builds and process steps you run over and over shouldn't be rebuilt from scratch every time. Groups and packages let you bundle the tasks and parts for a process into one package and drop the whole thing onto a job in a single click, with the labor and parts already attached.
Blueprint the build and verify every step
Build a task with a checklist and a description and you've turned it into a blueprint. Record the specs that matter — bore and stroke, clearances, torque values — right on the task, lay out the steps that have to happen in order, and require the checks to be signed off before the job can be marked complete. Nothing ships until the build sheet says it's done.
Get sharper on pricing with every build
Every time you track time on a process you run often, MSA keeps that history — and surfaces it right in the add-task screen when you're building the next estimate. Instead of guessing what a balance job or a valve job takes, you quote from what it has actually taken you, again and again. The more you build, the more accurate your estimating and pricing get.
Run jobs for customers you'll never meet
A lot of this work arrives by freight — you never shake the customer's hand. So authorization and payment have to work at a distance. Send authorization requests and build updates by text or email and let the customer approve remotely, then request payment with text-to-pay or email-to-pay links before the freight heads back out. The whole job can run start to finish without the customer ever setting foot in the shop.
MSA wasn't adapted for engine and transmission work after the fact. Core tagging, blueprint checklists, process packages, and historical time data are in here because builders asked for them — and because the people who built MSA come from this world.