Hickory, NC · Western Piedmont · Catawba County
A part-time CIO for Hickory, NC firms.
Furniture and industrial manufacturers, often running two plants on two systems and adding the numbers up by hand.
Typical setup for this market. Not a client count.
The market
What Hickory looks like from here.
Hickory's economy is furniture, textiles, and advanced manufacturing, with distribution and healthcare alongside. A manufacturer here often runs two plants, or one plant and a warehouse, each on its own system. The monthly question from the owner is simple: what did we make, what did it cost, and what did we earn? Answering it usually means two exports and a spreadsheet.
The typical setup is an ERP, the system that runs orders and production, plus a shop-floor or warehouse system, Microsoft 365, and a margin report built at month end. We connect those systems to one dashboard you own, so the two plants add up without anyone retyping them. The AI rules come first, because quoting staff are usually already putting drawings and pricing into an unapproved AI tool. Hickory sits in Catawba County, and manufacturers across the Western Piedmont run the same two-site pattern.
What we would expect to find here. Two sites on two systems is the pattern here. Bringing them into one honest number is usually the first thing the dashboard does, in the first month.
Hickory 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 Hickory
Who we work with here.
Start here
- AI Use Policy — Advisory review
- Applications assessment — Assessment
- Base dashboard deployment — Deployment
Questions
Questions about working with us from Hickory
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.
How do you consolidate reporting from two sites?
Reporting from two sites is consolidated by connecting both systems to one dashboard. Each site keeps its own system. Both feed the dashboard, and the numbers are matched the same way every month. The argument about which spreadsheet is right ends when there is only one number.
Start here
The first step is the same in every location.
Advisory first, in Hickory as everywhere else: a written assessment you own.