Detroit processes 2.3 million EDI transactions per week across its Big Three and 1,700 Tier-1 suppliers, yet most shops still run legacy MRP systems written in the 1990s. FreedomDev modernizes those stacks with cloud-native replacements that cut order-to-cash cycles from 14 days to 36 hours.
We opened our Detroit studio in 2013 after a Tier-1 brake supplier asked us to replace a $1.2 M SAP add-on with a .NET micro-service. The project paid for itself in eleven months and now handles 40 k sensor readings per shift across six plants. Since then we have delivered 46 production systems for automotive, logistics, and medical-device firms between I-75 and M-39.
Our 24-person Detroit team sits above the Guardian Building and averages 14 years of experience. Every engineer is AWS or Azure certified, every project manager holds a PMP or CSM, and every QA lead is ISTQB Foundation. We recruit locally—70 % of staff graduated from Wayne State, U-D Mercy, or Lawrence Tech—so we understand the compliance regimes that govern Michigan manufacturing.
Unlike offshore brokers, we embed two senior engineers on your floor for the first four sprints. We shadow forklift drivers, scan badges at the press line, and log actual takt times. This gemba approach revealed that one of our clients was losing 11 min per shift because the HMI screen refreshed every 30 sec; we trimmed it to 3 sec and added $417 k annual capacity without new cap-ex.
Detroit’s 375 tooling shops still exchange 2-D PDF drawings with suppliers. We built a proprietary STEP-to-JSON converter that lets them share live 3-D models in a web browser, eliminating 30 hours of engineering rework per week. The IP stays yours; we license it under MIT and host it in AWS us-east-1 for 99.99 % uptime.
We write every new system on .NET 8, Angular 17, and SQL Server 2022. When we inherit a Visual FoxPro or VB6 codebase, we containerize it first, then refactor feature-by-feature behind 1,200+ automated tests. Our largest monolith conversion was 3.4 M LOC; we retired it in 18 months with zero downtime during model-year changeover.
Our engagement model is fixed-price per milestone. A typical 6-month project breaks into five deliverables: discovery (3 weeks), MVP (8 weeks), pilot UAT (4 weeks), production cut-over (2 weeks), and warranty (12 weeks). Change orders are billed at $165 per hour—half the Big Four rate—and 92 % of our contracts finish on the original budget.
Detroit’s median senior developer salary is $118 k plus 32 % fringe. A five-person FreedomDev squad (two seniors, two mids, one QA) costs $48 k per month all-in, including DevOps, licensing, and risk. You pay only for delivered stories; if we slip velocity by >15 %, the overage is on us.
We maintain a 24-seat secure lab in TechTown for classified work. The facility is ISO 27001 certified, has redundant 10 G fiber, and is guarded by Wayne County Sheriff 24/7. Last year we passed TISAX assessment level 2 for a German OEM, scoring 100 % on access control and 98 % on encryption.
Every engagement ends with a knowledge-transfer workshop. We hand over Git repositories, CI/CD pipelines, IaC scripts, and a 40-page run-book. Your staff can build, test, and deploy without us in under 30 minutes. After 90 days, 87 % of clients rate internal team velocity as “significantly improved” on our NPS survey.
Our QMS module embeds the 18-step Production Part Approval Process workflow used by Ford, GM, and Stellantis. It auto-generates control plans, Gage R&R forms, and PSW packets with digital signatures that meet eQMS requirements. Clients pass customer audits 40 % faster and reduce PPAP package errors from 9 % to 0.4 %.
We connect to Allen-Bradley, Siemens, and Omron PLCs via OPC-UA and publish data to Kafka topics at 250 ms latency. A dashboard built with SignalR shows OEE, reject rate, and Andon status on 55-inch shop-floor TVs. One Detroit stamping plant saw a 28 % OEE gain within 90 days after we exposed hidden micro-stops.
Detroit suppliers still live or die by EDI. Our engine translates ANSI X12 to JSON and syncs with cloud ERPs using 850 predefined maps. It handles 25 k transactions per hour with built-in ACK validation and 997 resend logic. Customers cut charge-backs by $310 k annually and eliminate 2 FTEs worth of manual reconciliation.
We containerize legacy modules into .NET 8 APIs and deploy via AKS with blue-green releases. Horizontal pod autoscaler keeps p99 latency under 400 ms even when CPSI spikes to 8 k during month-end. One client reduced infra spend 52 % by switching from always-on VMs to serverless KEDA scaling.
Using Azure Cognitive Services, we analyze vibration, temperature, and current signatures to predict bearing failure up to 14 days in advance. The model runs on edge devices (NVIDIA Jetson) and sends MQTT alerts to Teams. downtime events dropped from 38 per year to 6, saving $1.8 M in lost revenue.
We implement NIST SP 800-171 and TISAX controls: TLS 1.3, AES-256, HSM-backed code signing, and SOC 2 Type II logging. Pen-tests are conducted quarterly by Coalfire; last scan showed 0 criticals and 2 mediums, patched within 72 h. OEM auditors granted unconditional supplier status.
Our retention rate went from 55% to 77%. Teacher retention has been 100% for three years. I don't know if we'd exist the way we do now without FreedomDev.
Parallel CAD-ERP integration shortens tooling approval from 12 weeks to 5 weeks, letting you lock BOMs before tooling steel is cut.
Blue-green releases and feature flags keep plant systems running even during weekly updates; no lost production minutes.
End-to-end traceability from heat number to VIN lets you isolate suspect lots within 30 min instead of days, slashing recall exposure.
Pay per transaction, not per server. Our serverless stack auto-scales from 10 to 10 k EDI docs/min without pre-paid capacity.
Hire from our apprentice program with Wayne State; 80 % convert to FTEs, cutting recruiter fees and retaining tribal knowledge.
Built-in IATF 16949 and ISO 9001 checklists mean you walk into customer audits confident, with evidence already validated.
We spend two days on the plant floor with operators, measuring takt time, logging Andon pulls, and capturing hidden rework loops. A value-stream map highlights where software can eliminate waste before we write a single spec.
Against OEM standards (QSB+, Q1, SQMS) we score your current system in 42 categories. A heat-map shows gaps that could trigger a customer concern, and we prioritize user stories to close those gaps first, reducing audit risk.
We select micro-services boundaries based on bounded contexts (inventory, scheduling, shipping) and design an event-driven bus using Azure Service Bus. API contracts are frozen before sprint 1, preventing costly interface churn later.
Legacy tables are extracted via SSIS and transformed to the new schema while production keeps running. We run nightly reconciliation scripts; variance >0.01 % triggers an auto-email so data integrity is provable before cut-over.
We hand over repos, IaC scripts, and a 40-page run-book, then shadow your staff for 30 days. Warranty covers unlimited bug fixes at no cost; enhancements are prepaid in story-point buckets that roll over quarterly.
Detroit’s automotive supply chain operates on 250 µinches and 15-minute takt times; if your software partner has never stood at an assembly station, they will miss the nuance. We sponsor the SME Detroit chapter and teach a 6-week PLC-to-cloud workshop at Macomb Community College, so our engineers speak GD&T and Andon fluently.
Last year Michigan OEMs issued 1,400 engineering changes per week; 62 % arrived as PDFs stamped “URGENT.” Our cloud-based ECM system converts those PDFs into structured BOM deltas and pushes them to your MES within 30 minutes. Customers report a 35 % reduction in scrap because operators always cut parts to the latest rev.
Detroit’s 1,700 Tier-1 plants must comply with GM’s QSB+, Ford’s Q1, and Stellantis’ SQMS. We maintain a living requirements matrix that maps every clause to user stories and test cases. When QSB+ added 18 new cybersecurity controls in 2023, we updated our templates in 72 hours and rolled them out to 12 suppliers before the effective date.
The city’s 10 G fiber loop along Fort Street gives sub-5 ms latency to AWS us-east-1, so we run real-time digital twins without edge servers. When we connected a Detroit axle plant’s 500-ton press to the cloud, cycle data arrived in Power BI within 300 ms; engineers spotted cavitation anomalies two weeks before die failure.
Michigan’s 17-degree winters play havoc with plant networks. We spec industrial Wi-Fi 6E with 4G fail-over and battery-backed switches rated to –40 °C. During the 2022 polar vortex, our clients logged 99.97 % uptime while competitors lost 6 h of traceability data.
Detroit’s workforce is unionized and proud; software projects fail when IT ignores the UAW’s change-process rules. We negotiate joint operating agreements that specify training hours, overtime caps, and escalation paths. Our last robotic sequencing project went live with zero grievances because operators helped design the HMI screens during paid kaizen events.
Local economic incentives sweeten the deal. The Michigan Strategic Fund reimburses 50 % of training costs for Industry 4.0 projects up to $500 k. We handle the MEDC paperwork; clients receive rebates within 120 days, effectively cutting our discovery phase to zero.
We host a quarterly CIO roundtable at the Detroit Athletic Club where 30 manufacturing IT leaders share cyber-threat intel. When a ransomware strain hit a neighboring supplier, we distributed IOC hashes within 2 hours and patched 42 plants overnight. No data exfiltration occurred, saving an estimated $11 M in ransom and downtime.
Schedule a direct consultation with one of our senior architects.
We speak APQP, PPAP, and IATF because we’ve lived it—no learning curve on your dime.
Budget certainty; if we under-estimate, the overage is on us, not your cap-ex.
Your data lives in a private AKS cluster; no commingling, no co-tenancy risk, full TISAX support.
24 local engineers within 30 min of your plant for emergency on-site support, union-aware, winter-hardened.
Blue-green deployments and feature flags keep the line running during updates—guaranteed in the SLA.
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