← Back to Bead BoardWelding shop whiteboard vs Bead Board
The whiteboard on the wall above the coffee pot, with ten jobs written on it in two different colors of marker, and one of them half-erased from somebody leaning on it with a jacket. Every welding shop started here. A lot of them are still here. There's nothing wrong with that, exactly.
Why the whiteboard works
It's free after the one trip to Staples. It's visible to everybody in the shop at once. It doesn't need a login, a password, a battery, or WiFi. Power goes out and the board is still there. The new welder you hired last week can read it with zero training. The owner walks by it five times a day without having to open anything.
That's a lot to give up. We built Bead Board trying not to give it up. The board on your screen is supposed to feel like the one on your wall, just with a memory bolted on.
Side by side
Where the whiteboard starts costing you jobs
A customer calls about the handrail you quoted back in February. You walk to the board. It's not on there anymore because you finished it and wiped the line. You try to remember what you charged. You guess three hundred bucks. You send the invoice. Later that day you find the scrap of paper with the real number on it and you charged a hundred and forty dollars less than you should have. The board didn't remember. Nobody did.
Your welder is at a job site two hours away. He needs to know what you quoted on the gate install so he doesn't have to call you and wait for you to walk to the board and read it to him. The whiteboard can't help him. You drop what you're doing, walk out to the floor, squint at the marker, and read him the number. You do this five times a day.
Or the best one: somebody leans on the board with a Carhartt jacket and erases the Henderson job. Nobody notices until Wednesday when Henderson calls asking for a status update and nobody on the floor even remembers that job was on the board last Thursday.
What we kept from the whiteboard
The board view. The column-by-column layout. The way the most important stuff about a job is the first thing you see. The fact that you can glance at it and know where everything is without reading anything. We looked at a lot of project management software that tries to be a whiteboard and drowns it in tabs and settings and views. We kept cutting until what was left looked like a whiteboard that could also remember things, take photos, and pull up what you charged last year.
Also worth reading: welding spreadsheet • QuickBooks for the shop floor • WeldTrace (code welding) • Jobber (field services).