Most Fourth Shift sites we walk into are using a fraction of what they paid for, carrying customizations nobody remembers, and running nightly processing that's one failed job from a bad month-end. The AI Expert reads your whole environment — configuration, data, processes, code, integrations — and we verify what it finds against your data. You get graded findings, a roadmap, and the quick wins for this quarter.
Technical health and implementation quality are two different problems that get blamed on each other. The assessment looks at both, and says which is which.
Read-only access to the server, database and configuration. Nothing changes.
Trained on the Fourth Shift corpus and our field conventions. Days, not weeks.
Traced to source in your data and graded by evidence. Nothing unproven ships.
Findings, a roadmap, and the quick wins for this quarter. Fixed price.
SQL Server version and configuration, database health and growth, backups that actually restore, nightly and batch processing, job failures nobody's alerted to, the shares and services the plant depends on.
Item, BOM, routing, supplier and customer masters. Duplicates, orphans, missing classes, cost rolls that haven't rolled, the fields that decide whether MRP can be trusted.
Planning fences, order policies, costing method, GL account assignment, module communication, security. What was set at install, what's been touched since, and what it's costing.
Which modules and screens carry real transactions, where the workaround became the process, where a spreadsheet replaced a screen, and where one person is the control.
Inventory of every custom report, script, Data Import template, VisiBar script and interface — what it does, who owns it, what breaks if it stops. Usually the most surprising section.
How far from the transaction the numbers travel before they're decided on. Where reports disagree with each other and why. What a validated reporting layer would change first.
The expert is built on the Fourth Shift product corpus — manuals, schema, transaction contracts, the Data Import dictionary — plus twenty-five years of what actually goes wrong in plants. Pointed at a read-only extract of your environment, it does in a day what a consultant does in a month: reads every parameter, profiles every master table, inventories every custom object, and matches what it sees against what a healthy site looks like.
Then the part that matters. We verify every finding against your data before it goes in the report, and grade it by evidence — observed in your transactions, derived from them, or documented by your people. A finding we can't show you in your own numbers doesn't ship. That's the same discipline behind everything we build: no demo on unvalidated data, ever.
Sites, modules, customizations, what's keeping you up. You get a fixed price and a fixed scope in writing the next day.
Database and server access over VPN, or an on-prem run if nothing can leave your network. A conversation with whoever runs the nights.
The expert profiles the environment; we trace each finding to source and grade it. Two to three weeks, mostly asynchronous.
Findings with evidence, a sequenced roadmap where each step pays for the next, and the handful of fixes worth doing this month. Walked through live with your team.
The assessment is the cheapest thing we sell and the one we'd buy first. It replaces the "We think our system is fine, mostly" conversation with a documented picture of what you have — which makes every decision after it cheaper: what to fix now, whether a full business process review is warranted, whether a modern layer over Fourth Shift gets you what a migration promised, or what a migration would really involve.
And if the answer is "you're in better shape than you thought," you'll hear that too. We don't get paid more for finding problems.
Thirty minutes on a call and we can tell you what the assessment would cover for your environment and what it costs. If it's not the right first step, we'll say so.
You'll get a straight answer and a tight scope. If we can't help, we'll tell you that too — and usually who can.
