An Interview with Jason Ray, Paperless Parts

In a recent episode of Products Finishing’s On the Line podcast, we sat down with Jason Ray, CEO and co-founder of Paperless Parts (Boston, Mass.), a software provider that offers a secure estimating and quoting system to help improve the ways companies involved in the manufacturing process communicate and work together. Ray’s observations touch on how software can be used to shorten lead times and streamline communications between finishing shops and machine shops. His insights into the trends happening in manufacturing today and what it all means for finishers paint a picture of a changing industry with plenty of opportunity for growth.

Give us some background about Paperless Parts and the kind of software solutions that the company offers.

We founded Paperless Parts a little over four years ago. We built this entire solution around the idea of accessibility. How do we make manufacturing more accessible? How do we alleviate the friction that is in a lot of front offices in manufacturing facilities today? We looked at other industries using tools like Salesforce and HubSpot. We saw companies using a lot of great automation for configuring their price quote. We saw a lot of great collaboration tools being used. But when we looked at the manufacturing supply chain — be it machine shops, fabricators, plating, painting, post-processing, heat treating — we saw a lack of investment in the front office of those operations. We set out to build a solution for the manufacturing industry to allow automation and software best practices to be used.

Can you talk specifically about the finishing industry and the typical bottlenecks that you see as potential opportunities?

When I look at plating companies and the bottlenecks that they’re facing, it seems like a lot of the problem is a product of the relationships that they have with their customers. Many plating shops get redacted prints that make it difficult to understand exactly what you’re quoting. There’s a lot of risk in trying to interpret a print and often getting that same print, redacted in different ways from different shops. The plating company may end up quoting that part five times and may not know it. Most finishers don't have a system in place that allows them to track whether they’ve ever seen anything like that before. That’s a big problem. That’s five times the effort and potential risk that you might not quote it the same way.

What manufacturing trends are you keeping your eye on and what do you think it means for finishers in the years to come?

I’m seeing a lot of consolidation in general, across the manufacturing industry. We’re seeing a lot of smaller shops starting to get rolled up into private equity funds and manufacturing groups. As those shops become what I would call captive, it challenges our flexibility as an industry to be able to do the job shop type work — the low volumes, the high mix, the critical, quick fix, just-in-time manufacturing that a lot of the U.S. does.

What advice do you have for up-and-coming leaders in this industry?

I think we’re seeing a lot of folks step into positions of leadership in finishing. The opportunity here is immense. Some of these businesses have traditionally been run by brute force, pen and paper, filing cabinets, general memory and tribal knowledge. With young people coming into the industry, they are going to arrive with a native tech background and an understanding of software that allows them to take these businesses to the next level and scale dramatically. And I think it’s going to set these companies apart from the competition. I think that’s the best thing I can leave young people entering the industry with — you have an enormous opportunity here.

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Listen to the full podcast interview with Paperless Parts CEO and co-founder Jason Ray, available for streaming or download at pfonline.com/podcast.