// case study · aerospace parts distribution and mro
From 15 Monday boards to one operational system
How a DC-area aerospace parts broker replaced fifteen Monday boards, a 1.6 TB document store, and a wall of hand-built templates with a single instrumented system of record.
x 15 boards · 1.6 TB of documents · no system of record
+ one relational job · quote to delivery · every asset instrumented
Monday.com boards an order physically migrated through as it aged — RFQ, orders, warehouse, finance, archive.
Line items imported out of those boards into core operational models, each one hanging off a single relational job.
A shared archive with no relationship to the jobs, shipments, and labels the documents belonged to.
Boards were stitched together only by free-text reference numbers typed by hand.
// the operating reality
What the operation ran on before
- Day-to-day work spread across fifteen Monday.com boards holding roughly 14,000 line items, a tangle of Google Sheets, a 1.6-terabyte shared document store, QuickBooks, and a library of hand-built Word and PDF templates.
- An order’s history physically migrated from one board to the next as it aged — RFQ, to orders, to warehouse, to finance, to archive — stitched together only by free-text reference numbers typed by hand.
- RFID tags were peeled off a pre-printed spool and scanned into the DoD tracking system with nothing in the company’s own records linking that tag to the job it belonged to.
- MIL-STD-129 compliance labels were produced by opening a third-party tool, screenshotting the output, and manually eyeballing the print scale — the client’s own description of the bottleneck on every shipment.
- High-value, corrosion-sensitive components sat in storage with zero monitoring of the temperature and humidity that drive corrosion and scrap.
- No reliable way to answer a simple question: where is this part right now, and what condition is it in?
// what we deployed
The system we built around it
A customer-specific extension of the Vorpal platform — a mountable Rails engine — became the single operational record. Every document, shipment, label, and RFID tag now hangs off one relational job that keeps a single identity from quote to delivery.
Roughly 14,000 records imported out of fifteen Monday boards into core operational models, ending the free-text reference numbers that were the only thing connecting the old system together.
Field gateways — BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi units over ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular — register through a secured REST API, authenticate with rotating BCrypt-hashed keys, and stream temperature, humidity, pressure, vibration, and moisture on a configurable heartbeat into a time-series store.
A rule engine evaluates every reading against per-asset and per-equipment-type thresholds — greater-than, less-than, in-range, and N-consecutive-breach conditions, each with its own cooldown — raising info, warning, and critical alerts to email and Slack. A background health check flags any device that goes quiet and auto-clears when it returns.
RFID tag records now cross-reference the job, the MIL label, the shipment’s Transportation Control Number, and the DoD scan. MIL-STD-129 labels generate as print-ready PDFs and stream straight to the warehouse’s Zebra printers as ZPL with Code 128 and Data Matrix/PDF417 barcodes.
Monthly cycle counts are done by barcode scan against printed bin tags. Receiving is captured on structured checklists with a four-stage repair-photo record: incoming, out-to-repair, returned, shipped-to-customer.
// results
What changed
- Environmental monitoring of stored inventory
- Humidity and temperature alerts warn of corrosion risk before high-value components are damaged
- Asset condition and location
- Continuous record per tracked asset, updating in real time
- Chain of custody
- Every move, check-out, and check-in logged with location, timestamp, operator, condition, calibration state, and barcode scan
- Auditor reconstruction
- Each IoT gateway maintains its own independent location history
- RFID tag to job link
- A queryable digital record instead of a paper label
- MIL-STD-129 labeling
- One-click compliant print, replacing screenshot-and-scale
- Inventory counts
- Barcode scans with automatic variance flagging
- Preventive maintenance
- Scheduled off runtime hours and service intervals, with cost, vendor, and parts history per asset
- Fifteen siloed boards
- One relational source of truth
Published case study: 50Pros →
// where to start
Recognize your operation in this?
Bring the spreadsheets, the aging database, the ERP gaps, the document archive, or the workflow that is creating operational risk. We will determine whether The Mad Botter is the right fit.