When Bryce Fitzke set out to find a better way to document engine builds at Husker Power Products, he wasn't looking for a manufacturing execution system. He was trying to solve a problem most small shops know all too well: work instructions that don't stay put.
"We were using Excel at first, and I didn't like the repeatability of it," Bryce told us. A month later, the formatting in his new Excel version wouldn't match that of his old Excel versions. So he asked his boss for permission to spend some time on Google, researching software. What he found was Pico's free version—and about 18 months later, he's become what the Pico team calls our single biggest power user of the free tier.
Husker Power Products is a family-owned industrial engine distributor and packager based in Hastings, Nebraska, that's been building custom power units since 1981. They package Tier 4 diesel, EPA-certified gas, and service-replacement irrigation power units, along with generator sets, working directly with OEM customers on builds that are "never off-the-shelf, cookie-cutter solutions." It's a shop with a dozen or so employees, up to six operators on any given day, four of them on tablets. (Huskerpowerproducts)
That's exactly the kind of shop Pico was built for. In our origin story, we talk about the inspiration for Pico and why it is designed as a modular MES, originally built for the small and mid-sized manufacturers that make up the vast majority of the American supply base, not the billion-dollar enterprises. According to SCORE, 98.6% of American manufacturing companies are small businesses, and 75.3% of them have fewer than 20 employees. Though we do have many enterprises now, our whole premise is being the fastest way for discrete manufacturers to error-proof assembly, digitize work instructions, and add traceability without a massive MES project, and that works for manufacturers of all sizes.
Bryce's decision came down to friction—or the lack of it.
"The free version was there; you didn't have to jump through any hoops to get it. The ease of access was good," he said. "It wasn't like you're signing your life away to access the free version. It was simple, easy to set up and get going."
That's by design. As we've said publicly, "This is not a free trial with a time limit. This no-cost model supports our mission of modernizing the supply base and taking cost out of the equation." Automation World
He also liked that Pico gently constrained him. "You didn't have a lot of options [features to add to the work instruction], which is a good thing," he said. "It's easy for me to repeat [the format of] what I did a year ago to what I'm doing now." Compared to Excel, building his first work instruction in Pico was "super easy."
This tracks with what we hear constantly. The real competitor isn't a legacy MES; it's the spreadsheet and the PowerPoint slide deck. More than 90 percent of new Pico users switched from paper-based methods rather than from another MES. We regularly talk to customers about how you don't need full “MES” capabilities (nor do you need to pay for full MES); you just need to get off PowerPoint.
What makes Husker Power remarkable isn't just that they adopted the free version; it's that they adapted it and that Bryce uses it rigorously.
Nearly all of Husker Power's large OEM builds are now documented in Pico. Bryce exports PDF hard-copy backups matched to Pico revision numbers and dates, so there's always a paper trail tied to the exact digital revision. And he runs a three-way bill-of-materials check: the BOM in Pico is matched order-for-order and quantity-for-quantity against the internal kit BOMs and the engineer's SolidWorks model. Three identical systems with sign-offs.
"It was kind of nice having that whole bill of material at the end," Bryce said. "That was a game changer." (For teams considering it, this is exactly what our digital work instructions and BOM features are built to support.)
Bryce even built a manual version of a paid feature. He uses the first step of every work instruction as a change log and acknowledgment page, and so the operators have to initial it before they can proceed. In the Professional tier, revision-flagging is handled automatically, but Bryce engineered the behavior himself in the free version. Both our founder, Ryan, and I have said that if we ran a small shop with limited smart tools, we'd probably just use the free version too, and Bryce is hitting nearly every feature we've built behind the paywall, just doing a slightly manual version of it.
The payoff of that discipline shows up in real quality catches. On one build, Bryce's BOM review flagged that the documented coolant fill was four gallons short of what the unit actually required. The fix was operational: they added a flow meter to the coolant fill and now average gallons per unit across builds.
"Pico helped push for that [traceability], just to keep everything organized," Bryce said. That's the continuous-improvement loop we love: the system doesn't just record work, it flags the questions worth asking.
Adoption wasn't frictionless. Operators pushed back at first, wanting to keep paper and their old notes.
"There were some words being thrown out, and they didn't want it. They wanted paper, and they wanted to keep their old notes," Bryce recalled. "The minute somebody writes down something on their own notes, that's when it changes, and you're not repeating the builds."
This is the quiet insight at the center of Husker Power's story and one we see across customers moving off paper. On a tablet, nobody can pencil in an unofficial shortcut. Revision control actually holds. "At least the tablets and Pico keep them to that set work instruction every time," Bryce said. With Excel binders, every rev change means walking the floor to swap every printed page: friction that can quietly discourage people from making the change at all, and leaves room for operators to scribble notes that undo standard work.
Today the resistance is gone. "Now the guys are kind of starting to rely on it," Bryce said. "They're seeing how important it is and that we want the repeatability and the quality."
Husker Power layers Pico with a physical poka-yoke, too: every assembler has their own paint marker color, and any bolt they touch gets a dot or dash. "We can trace it back to that paint marker color," Bryce said - a manual traceability system that complements the digital build record.
Bryce also uses Pico's build timestamps to run time studies that validate the labor estimates baked into customer kits and pricing. (There's a running joke about a build that logged "60 hours" because a timer kept running over a Friday pause. Real time-study data has a sense of humor.)
And quality? "Definitely for the better," Bryce said, "but nobody wants to talk about that. They only wanna talk about the problems that pop up." Instruction-based QC checks now run throughout every build.
Ask Bryce for his top three, and the list is refreshingly practical: it's organized, simple, and to the point; it offers ease of access; and it includes the BOM plus time-study features. "It's very organized. It's simple, to the point... fit, form and function, the layout's good. It just works." Or, more simply: "This works. I don't know. It just works. I love it."
Here's the part that surprises people: we're genuinely happy leaving Bryce on the free version.
The math is stark. Of roughly 239,000 U.S. manufacturing firms, only about 4,000 have 500 or more employees, meaning the overwhelming majority are small shops that do not need a $100,000+ MES project that takes a year to implement. Husker Power is doing exactly what we thought far more people would use the free version for: small shops and sub-10 operators (our free Basic plan supports 3 admins and up to 10 operators per site) to digitize without overburdening their world.
For shops that do outgrow it, the path is clear and public: Essential is $100/user/month or $1,000/site/month, and Professional adds $100 per connected station/month for smart-tool integrations and automated revision notification. The point where connected tools and deeper analytics become worth it. For a shop like Husker Power, the free version is the right tool today. Software Finder
If you're still on Excel or PowerPoint, start where Bryce started. Sign up for the free version, digitize one build, and see if it holds. You can read how other manufacturers - Winston Industries, Lithos Energy, HJI, and MORryde - scaled from there when they were ready.
As Bryce put it when we asked why he stuck with it: "I kind of took it as a challenge to see how far I could get with the free version." Eighteen months in, the answer is clear: pretty far.