Concord, NC · Charlotte metro · Cabarrus County
A part-time CIO for Concord, NC firms.
Manufacturers and distributors on the Charlotte edge who can measure every pallet but have never written down a rule for AI.
Typical setup for this market. Not a client count.
The market
What Concord looks like from here.
Concord is manufacturing, distribution, and motorsport engineering on the Charlotte edge, with a fast-growing residential base. Operations here are physical and measurable, so the reporting question is easy to explain. What did we ship, what did it cost, and where is the inventory? The AI rule is the thing that gets put off, right up until a customer's audit asks for it.
The systems in a Concord operation are typically an ERP for orders and production, a warehouse system, Microsoft 365, and a sales system. Margin reporting is done by hand at month end. We connect production, inventory, and finance so they agree in one dashboard you own. Before anything connects, we write the AI rule for quoting, drawings, and customer data, so the audit question has an answer. Concord sits in Cabarrus County, and operations-led firms across the Charlotte metro run the same three separate systems.
What we would expect to find here. Production, inventory, and finance are three separate systems here. One dashboard that makes them agree is the first deliverable, and the AI rule gets written before it.
Concord is a service area, not an office. One team, based in North Carolina, works in your own systems.
Where this has run
A profile close to this setup.
Reporting was three exports reconciled by hand.
Light manufacturer · ~120 staff
Industries in Concord
Who we work with here.
Start here
- AI Use Policy — Advisory review
- Applications assessment — Assessment
- Base dashboard deployment — Deployment
Where we work
Around Concord and across NC.
Questions
Questions about working with us from Concord
Where are you based and do you work remotely?
Third Shift Group LLC is based in North Carolina and works with firms across North and South Carolina. Most of the work runs remotely, against your Microsoft cloud account and your systems. Policy meetings and leadership sessions can be on site where that helps. See where we work for the regions and towns we cover.
Can you report margin by product line across two systems?
Yes, Third Shift can report margin by product line across two systems. That is a standard Concord request. Production, inventory, and finance each keep their own system, and the dashboard matches them so margin is read once instead of rebuilt in a spreadsheet every month.
Start here
The first step is the same in every location.
Advisory first, in Concord as everywhere else: a written assessment you own.