Most writing about operational software, the smart factory, AI in manufacturing, quietly assumes you are big. It assumes a budget for six-figure systems, an IT team to run them, and clean data already sitting in a warehouse. A small manufacturer has none of that. And small manufacturers are not a niche: about 99% of US manufacturers are small, most with fewer than twenty people.
I came to this from inside one, trying to build the kind of operation that is supposed to require a team and a budget I did not have. What came out of it is a method, and now an open tool.
What it does
Operations Blueprint is a small, deterministic engine (no LLM, no network) that takes ten answers about a shop and produces two things.
A foundation-first plan: the relational data model, the process and SOPs, an ordered build list, and a self-hostable tooling list.
