A Rad showcase company. The business is made up, the tools are real. See all three businesses
Industrial mixers and material handling, Erie, PA

Thirty years of service knowledge used to live in a binder and one man's head. Now it lives on a search desk.

Apex Manufacturing in Erie, PA builds industrial mixers and material-handling equipment, machines its own parts, and sells and services through about 40 dealers. Forty-eight people run it across two shifts. So does a stack of AI tools that Rad built, and this page shows a Tuesday with all of it switched on.

The problem the business is built around

  • Thirty years of manuals and service history in binders, and in the head of one technician who is about to retire.
  • 2,100 machines in the field with a 12-year service life, and every one will call someday.
  • Dealers undercutting each other on price while Apex finds out a quarter later.
2 days to 3 hrsAverage dealer ticket reply made up
70%Tickets closed from the first drafted reply
1 dayTo find a below-floor dealer listing, down from a quarter
2,100Machines in the field, each with its own service history

The figures on this page are invented to show the shape of the result. Where we quote a real client, we say so.

The people

Forty-eight people, two shifts, one owner who reads the overnight tickets with his coffee.

RL

Ray Lindqvist

Owner, second generation

Took over from his father and kept the plant in Erie. Decides a few things a day and wants the rest handled before he sees it.

CM

Carla Mendes

Service lead

Answers the dealers. Opens the service desk at 7:00, sends what is right, and fixes what is not. Nothing goes out until she says so.

GP

Gus Petrakis

Plant manager

Runs three machining lines, assembly and paint. Wants to know why a line is behind before the customer asks.

DO

Dee Okafor

Floor supervisor, first shift

Hands the floor to night shift every afternoon. Rehearses the handoff in RadSim first, because the last bad one cost a day.

MR

Mateo Ruiz

Technician, four months in

Learning machines that are older than he is. Asks the search desk first and the old-timers second, and says that is faster.

CR

Chris, Rad Consultants

The AI professional on retainer

Built the service desk through RadWorks, set up the reads and the role-play, and writes Ray one note a month about what to build next.

A Tuesday at Apex

Eight moments, every one of them run by a tool Rad has already built for a real client.

  1. Carla opens the service desk

    Eleven dealer tickets came in overnight. Each has a drafted reply that cites the exact manual page and the last three service visits on that serial number. She sends 9 and fixes 2.

    Apex Service Desk
  2. Production meeting

    The recording becomes action items with owners before the coffee is cold.

    Apex Service Desk
  3. The dealer price watch flags two dealers

    Both list the AX-400 below the floor price. A drafted note to each is waiting for Ray.

    Apex Service Desk
  4. Mateo asks the search desk

    He types "AX-400 gearbox whine under load" and gets the answer, the manual page, and the two prior fixes.

    Apex Service Desk
  5. The shop dashboard

    On-time ship rate, rework, backlog by line and this month's forecast. There is a plain-English box where Ray asks "why is line 2 behind?" and gets an answer.

    Apex Service Desk
  6. Dee rehearses a handoff

    A cross-shift handoff in RadSim, before night shift arrives. The debrief tells her what she skipped.

    RadSim
  7. The quarterly Dealer pulse lands

    A RadRoot read of the dealers. It shows which ones feel supported and which are about to go quiet.

    RadRoot
  8. Chris's monthly note

    What shipped, what the reads said, and what to build next. One page, in plain English.

    Rad
The software they run

Apex Service Desk: five screens, built through RadWorks.

Every screen is a branch of something Rad already built for a real business. The app here is a working mock: click through it, nothing sends.

Tickets

Every overnight dealer ticket with a drafted reply, the manual page it cites and the last three visits on that serial. Carla approves.

Branched from the support desk Rad built for L&L Kiln, which drafts a reply to every ticket from a knowledge base of 7,362 passages.

Search desk

Ask a plain question about any machine. Get the answer, the page, and the fixes that worked before.

Branched from L&L Kiln's search desk and a law firm's clause intranet.

Price watch

Forty dealers watched. Any listing below the floor price is flagged within a day, with a drafted note ready to approve.

Branched from L&L Kiln's dealer price watch.

Shop dashboard

On-time ship rate, rework, backlog by line and the monthly forecast, plus a box that answers questions in plain English.

Branched from a workforce software company's 19-chart dashboard with a plain-English assistant and the monthly forecast in Signarama's portal.

Meetings

The production meeting recording becomes action items with owners and due dates. One button sends them.

Branched from Signarama's portal, where meeting recordings become action items with owners.

Open the app

Hash-routed, fake data, no sign-in. Every Send and Approve says "In the real app this sends. Here it does not."

Open Apex Service Desk
Real tools you can open

These two are not mocks. They are the real products, running a made-up company.

RadRoot

Apex's reads of its dealers

Read-only sandbox, you land signed in
  • "Dealer pulse": 11 of 12 dealer principals answered (one stopped partway, as real people do), summary written.
  • Which dealers feel supported, and which are about to go quiet.
  • Idea tiles for the next read.
Open the RadRoot account Take the RadRoot tour
RadSim

Apex Manufacturing

Playable, no sign-in
  • Safety Incident Debrief with Compliance.
  • Giving Feedback to a Resistant Direct Report.
  • Cross-Shift Handoff: Getting Night Shift on Board.
  • Client Escalation: Delayed Shipment.
  • Budget Objection: Price vs. Offshore Competition.
  • New Hire 30-Day Check-In Conversation.
Open the RadSim library
A real client of ours

"Meeting recordings (from PLAUD) turn into action items with owners, so nothing said in a meeting gets lost."

Ethan Polto, Owner, Signarama
A real client of ours

"Rad Consultants built us an AI assistant that drafts a reply to every customer support ticket, drawing on our own manuals, specs, videos and years of past answers. Our team reviews and sends instead of starting from a blank page, and it has already drafted more than 500 real tickets."

Dimitri Lewicki, President, L&L Kiln Mfg Inc
What Rad does next

The 90-day plan Chris wrote for Ray.

I tell people that the only way AI works is with documented data. Apex has thirty years of it, in binders. So month one is the scanner, and it is the part that makes the rest hum.

Days 1 to 30

Scan the binders. Ticket drafts and the search desk go live for the service team, so the answers stop depending on who is in the building.

Days 31 to 60

Price watch goes live. The first Dealer pulse read goes out. Drafted dealer notes go through approval, and nothing is sent without a person.

Days 61 to 90

The shop dashboard with the forecast, and meeting capture. Supervisors rehearse in RadSim before every shift change for a month.

Read the full plan

Now picture yours.

Apex is made up. The tools are not. Describe how your business runs, about three minutes, and you get a written month-one plan for a tool shaped to your week.