Proven Web Apps. Now Available for Genius ERP – Job Shop Estimating, UPS Integration, and Nesting

If you’ve ever lost twenty minutes to a screen you shouldn’t have needed — flipping between a customer drawing, a spreadsheet, and Genius just to get one quote out the door — this session is for you. Oscar and Frank walk through Cortex, the suite of four proven web apps Genius ERP built directly from customer requests, each one aimed at a specific friction point custom manufacturers deal with every day: manual estimating from PDF drawings, re-keying shipment details into a separate UPS portal, syncing nesting software like ProNest by hand, and entering purchase orders line by line off a customer spreadsheet. Rather than a single sweeping platform change, each Cortex module solves one job on its own — SMIQ for quoting, Transit for shipping, NestSync for nesting, and Intake for purchase order processing — and can be deployed independently depending on where your shop feels the most pain. Oscar runs live examples inside Genius for each one, and Frank jumps in throughout with context on how these apps came out of real customer builds and get packaged as fixed-price, fixed-maintenance offerings. If double data entry, inconsistent quoting between estimators, or slow PO turnaround sound familiar, here’s a walk-through of what each Cortex app actually does and the results customers are seeing.

What You’ll Learn in This Webinar

Chapter 1 — Challenges in Estimation Process

Estimators at custom job shops can receive 30 to 50 unique customer drawings a week by email, and pricing each one depends on machine speeds, material costs, and shortcuts that usually live in an estimator’s head or a personal spreadsheet rather than in Genius. Cortex SMIQ replaces that manual process with reusable item templates — for example, a “cutting and welding” template that already has the right machines and operations selected — so entering a part’s holes and dimensions is enough to generate a priced, standardized quote line. It also recalculates unit pricing instantly if a customer asks for a different quantity, using real fixed and variable costs rather than a rough estimate. Genius reported roughly a 20% efficiency improvement from standardizing this workflow across estimators.

“Each part is unique or near unique.” — Oscar

Chapter 2 — Introduction to Genius Transit Module

Without this integration, shipping means re-entering weight, dimensions, and service level in a separate UPS portal — a second system that can produce inconsistent shipping costs, label errors, and no tracking visibility back in Genius. Cortex Transit pulls live UPS rates directly into a Genius shipping screen and writes the tracking number back onto the order, so customer service can quote, book, and track a shipment without touching another portal. Genius pointed to a shop handling three shipments a day across three clerks seeing meaningful savings within three months.

Talk to Sales about Cortex — if manual UPS entry or nesting rework is costing your team hours every week, this is a good place to start the conversation.

Chapter 3 — Overview of Cortex Nest Sync Module

Job shops cutting laser or plasma jobs typically keep Genius and their nesting software in sync by hand — exporting to Excel, reimporting into ProNest, and risking mismatched data before cutting even starts. NestSync automates job-lot creation grouped by plate or sheet, lets operators punch actual time against the lot (which is redistributed back to the original jobs automatically), and feeds real material usage from ProNest back into Genius inventory, costs, and order status with no manual step. Genius cited 30–50% less setup time, 40% fewer errors, 5–10% material savings from offcut optimization, and ROI under three months. As Frank noted, the packaged app today only supports ProNest, though the same integration pattern has been built for other nesting software like Trumpf or SigmaNest as custom projects.

Chapter 4 — Introduction to Cortex Intake Module

Precision subcontractors often receive annual purchase orders that get revised weekly — sometimes with two thousand lines changing quantities, dates, or part numbers — and manually keying that into Genius can take from thirty minutes to several hours per order while the customer waits. Cortex Intake uses an AI wizard to map an incoming PDF or Excel file to the right Genius fields, scores each order line for confidence, and automatically pushes anything above a 95% confidence score into Genius while flagging lower-confidence lines (like an unusually short lead time or an unexpected price) for manual review. Genius reported more than 80% of lines processing without human intervention, about 75% time saved, and entry time dropping to under ten minutes for a typical order.

Chapter 5 — Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Oscar recaps all four modules together: SMIQ means more quotes with fewer errors from the same team, Transit means zero double entry with full shipment visibility inside Genius, NestSync keeps job shops connected to ProNest with real data feeding back automatically, and Intake gets precision subcontractors to automated order confirmation in under an hour. Frank adds that all four started as one-off requests from real customers, have since been repeated across other accounts, and are now packaged at a fixed price with a small recurring annual fee to sustain them through future versions.