Metal-Tech Industries Becomes First Australian Manufacturer to Adopt Paperless Parts, Sees 25% Sales Growth

Background

Metal-Tech Industries (MTI) is a full-service sheet metal fabricator based in Brisbane, Australia. For more than 50 years, the company has built a reputation for high-quality sheet metal components and fast turnarounds. MTI offers a comprehensive range of in-house capabilities, including laser cutting, CNC punching, bending, hardware insertion, welding, grinding, powder coating, and assembly.

Under the leadership of Nathan Hockey and Glen Langford, MTI has been investing heavily in new technology from the factory floor to the front office. They’ve added 13 new pieces of high-tech equipment over the span of just a few years and dramatically increased their ability to solve customer problems quickly and at scale. “We’ve always been focused on quality, and we realized we needed the tech to back that up,” shared Glen.

Challenge

Despite all the investments they had made to upgrade their shop floor, MTI’s front office remained a bottleneck. “We modernized every other part of the business, but quoting was still holding us back,” said Glen.

There were no templates, no costing formulas—just estimators relying on gut instinct and experience. That inconsistency became a real problem. “It was clunky and manual,” Glen recalls. “We were constantly jumping between platforms, printing reports, reviewing them in one place, then entering data somewhere else. Nothing was live, and nothing felt connected.”

“We were all quoting different numbers for the same job,” Nathan added. “There was no standardization and it was completely dependent on who was doing the quoting.”

A lack of connectivity between their systems made it difficult to turn quotes around quickly. Estimators were forced to hop between disconnected tools to review geometry, nest parts, and finalize quotes. “The speed just wasn’t there,” Nathan said. “We couldn’t keep up.”

MTI set out to find a modern quoting solution, and the team spent more than a year actively searching for the right platform—traveling across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to evaluate dozens of quoting solutions. While many tools looked promising on the surface, the functionality often fell short. “You’d get excited, and then realize only certain features worked the way you needed them to,” Glen said. “To get what you actually wanted, you had to ask them to build out custom modules.”

Solution

After months of searching and striking out with solutions that looked good on the surface but didn’t deliver in practice, Nathan stumbled upon an episode of The Job Shop Show—a podcast hosted by Paperless Parts co-founder Jay Jacobs.

“I listen to a lot of podcasts, and when I heard the story behind Paperless and the guests who came on, it stood out. It just felt like it was actually built for manufacturers like us,” said Nathan.

Nathan tried reaching out, but at the time, Paperless Parts wasn’t yet available in Australia. “They wanted to get the product right before going international. I appreciated that.” Finally, while traveling to the U.S. for FABTECH 2023, he and Glen realized Paperless Parts would be exhibiting at the show. “We were there to look at machinery, but when we saw the Paperless booth, we made a beeline. We met the team, saw the software in action, and said, ‘Yep—this is 100% what we need.’” As soon as Paperless Parts was able to provide their software internationally in 2024, Metal-Tech Industries became the first Paperless Parts customer in Australia.

“From pre-sales to onboarding to support, the Paperless team has been fantastic,” Nathan said. “We visited their team in Boston during the implementation process before going live, and it was one of the best decisions we could’ve made. It helped us nail our workflows, system integrations, and custom formulas right from the start.”

From the moment an RFQ comes in, Paperless Parts streamlines MTI’s entire workflow. Incoming quotes are forwarded from a shared inbox directly into the platform, where they’re instantly organized in a centralized dashboard. Each quote is prioritized and accompanied by the relevant files (STEP models, PDFs, emails) all in one place.

From there, Paperless Parts automatically interprets models, breaking them down into individual components and identifying key features—holes, bends, inserts, welds, and more. The platform then applies detailed costing based on customizable manufacturing formulas. “We’re far more accurate now,” Nathan explained. “We’re not missing bend counts or underestimating welding. That kind of detail just wasn’t possible with other platforms, which typically stop at laser cutting.”

One of the biggest benefits of Paperless Parts is the ability to connect all of their data and communication channels. The platform integrates directly with MTI’s ERP system, MIE Trak Pro, eliminating double entry and enabling a seamless handoff from quote to production. It’s also transformed how the team collaborates with one another; Nathan and Glen often work remotely from Sydney, so before Paperless Parts, checking a quote might’ve taken 45 minutes and two phone calls. Now it takes less than five minutes, and they’re able to see all the information they need, message the estimator, and move on.

Training has also improved dramatically. “Our semi-retired ex-GM picked it up in two weeks,” Nathan said. “With our old system, that would’ve taken months. It’s just so much easier now to get people up to speed.” Today, seven team members across estimating, programming, purchasing, operations, admin, and reception actively use Paperless Parts to quote, collaborate, and drive business forward.

Results

With the help of Paperless Parts, Metal-Tech Industries has transformed quoting from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. Some key business results they’ve realized so far include:

1. A 30% increase in quote volume. After just four months of using Paperless Parts—despite a multi-week holiday shutdown—MTI already began producing 30% more quotes than before. “We’re not spending less time on quoting, because now, we’re quoting more than ever. And we can actually keep up with it,” says Nathan.

2. Dramatically reduced turnaround times. MTI now responds to most RFQs for individual parts and small assemblies in under 24 hours. Larger assemblies—20 parts or more—are quoted in under 48 hours on average. “We couldn’t even measure turnaround time before,” Nathan said. “Now we’ve got clear benchmarks and can move at the speed our customers expect.”

3. 25% sales growth. With the ability to turn quotes around quickly, MTI is no longer missing out on work that they previously had to no-quote or just took too long to respond to. They can now get in the door first with new opportunities, which has driven a 25% increase in sales.

Beyond the numbers, Paperless Parts has enabled MTI’s leadership team to step back from the day-to-day quoting process without sacrificing visibility or control. “I’ve been able to focus on other areas of the business,” Glen shared. “Before, that wouldn’t have been possible without hiring another estimator.”

As Paperless Parts’ first customer in Australia, MTI has laid the foundation for what a successful digital transformation can look like—even across continents and time zones.