GroundControl: Turning First Articles From a Bottleneck Into an Advantage | Ep. 536

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Six jobs waiting on a first article means six spindles sitting still. That is the math Mike lives with at Hill, running around 58 jobs a day where nearly every one needs an internal or external first article before parts can ship. When inspection becomes the constraint, good parts pile up behind paperwork, and paperwork does not make chips.

This week we sat down with Mehul Shah, co-founder of Ground Control, a company building what he calls mission critical software for highly regulated manufacturing. His thesis is simple. Aerospace, defense, medical, and semiconductor shops are drowning in Excel and pen-and-paper workflows, not because the people are behind the times, but because software was never really built for the shop floor or for the weight of ITAR, DFARS, and CMMC.

Ground Control started with one hairy, everyday problem: first article inspection reports. We get into how their software reads decades-old, hand-drawn prints that trip up ordinary OCR, balloons the drawing, fills out the AS9102, and pushes clean data straight into ProShop with a single click. It is the kind of automation that turns a shop’s worst bottleneck into a task almost anyone on the team can run.

We also talk about why now is the moment for this, from reshoring and record defense budgets to the labor math that says we cannot hire our way through the coming surge. Mehul shares how a 15-person team just earned FedRAMP certification, why AI lets them do the work of a company twice their size, and what their new contract review product does to catch a buyer’s price change buried in a six-figure PO before it becomes a costly mistake.

If your inspectors are your constraint and your smartest people are stuck on manual data entry, this one is for you.

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (1:02) Meet Mehul Shah, co-founder of Ground Control: Why Mehul chose manufacturing
• (5:20) Why manufacturing runs on Excel, and the real reason software never fit the shop floor
• (6:04) ITAR, DFARS, CMMC, CUI, and the infrastructure tax on regulated software
• (9:07) Mission critical software and the three tests Ground Control uses to pick a workflow
• (10:43) Invest in yourself first with ProShop ERP
• (12:19) Finding the wedge, and why first article inspection was the obvious first product
• (13:49) How first article really works at Hill, and why it becomes the daily bottleneck
• (15:53) Why the FAI is critical, process verification before you can ship and collect
• (16:35) Why now, defense budgets, the SpaceX IPO, the space race, and reshoring
• (18:29) LLMs let manufacturers build in-house, and when it still makes sense to buy
• (19:30) Build on standards and a solid data heartbeat, then augment with AI
• (21:07) A rocket ship, 200-plus customers in two years, including five public companies
• (22:18) Growing into demand and the hard part of turning down the wrong work
• (23:39) The seven habits of highly effective work holding with SMW Autoblok
• (24:22) Avoiding the solution looking for a problem, and how the idea took shape
• (25:53) Building GroundControl from the ground up and becoming compliant
• (28:07) The importance of trade shows and building in-person relationships
• (31:55) The story behind the name Ground Control (and a nod to Major Tom)
• (35:20) Turn AI buzzwords into outcomes at the IMTS Industrial AI Conference
• (36:06) Developing out the GroundControl software and finding their MVP
• (39:32) The ProShop integration: One click from ballooning to master process control
• (42:39) AI will not replace you, but the person using AI might
• (46:30) Introducing contract review and catching PO errors
• (49:37) The visitor check-in system (ITAR sign-in without the 20-year-old paper pad)
• (52:16) What Mehul is most excited about, FedRAMP, and the road to IMTS

Resources Mentioned

• Ground Control
• ProShop ERP
• SMW Autoblok
• IMTS Industrial AI Conference

Connect with Mehul Shah

• Connect with Mehul on LinkedIn
• GroundControl

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