WE ARE MANUFACTURING PEOPLE FIRST

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Our Mission: We believe the best Manufacturing Execution & Lab Management software is designed and developed by people who've lived in real-world manufacturing and R&D for decades, and not just read about it. We believe implementing MES or LIMS doesn’t need to be expensive or cumbersome — our flexible baseline supports rapid customization out of the box. When it comes to MES and LIMS, small and mid-size companies are usually either ignored or presented with ridiculous pricing that forces them to adopt paper travelers and spreadsheets for track & trace. We're changing that.
CRS was founded in 2013 by manufacturing veterans who spent their careers in semiconductor, solar, hard drive, and clean-tech. Ian and Matt (the founders) had both worked on commercial MES implementations — and both kept hitting the same walls: too rigid, too hard to use, too expensive. So they built their own. ToolTrack is the result.
Why do we call ourselves Chain Reaction Systems?

A chain reaction is what happens when one thing triggers another, compounding until the system sustains itself. That’s what good manufacturing software should do: better data drives better decisions, which improve the data further. We named the company for what we want ToolTrack to do for your business.

(Also: it sounds cooler than I-Track, and we got tired of people referring to us like an Apple product.)

Chain Reaction Systems

No long-term contracts. Unlimited named user accounts. Ongoing enhancements included at no extra cost. We structured it this way because we’d rather earn your business every month than hold you to a contract — and because charging per seat discourages the kind of adoption that makes the software actually useful.

The industry default is a one-size-fits-all product that forces you to change your processes, takes 6–12 months to deploy, and costs a fortune. That’s what happens when software is built by people who’ve never actually worked in manufacturing.
We’ve taken a different approach because we’ve lived it our entire careers. From your first call, you’ll be working with a US-based system architect who handles your implementation from start to finish — customizations, training, and post go-live support. We’ve seen every scenario: starting from scratch, graduating from paper travelers, replacing a legacy system, or scaling up automation. The result is an MES that does exactly what you need, in 4–8 weeks, built around your processes.
Some people ask us how we can offer such a compelling product for such a low cost, and the answer is simple: our team focuses on the software, not on marketing. The success of our customers is the best marketing we could ask for, and we love getting word-of-mouth references. ToolTrack gets better with every customer — requests go in, improvements come out, and everyone benefits. Check out the Testimonials page to see why our customers are so happy.

Meet the Founders

Ian Chizmar, Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Chain Reaction Systems

Ian received his B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from the University of Washington (Go Huskies!) in 2002 and his entire career has been in high-tech manufacturing with a focus on MES and decision-support systems. He built his first MES-lite application in 2009 and never looked back.

Ian Chizmar
Co-Founder / Chief Architect
Matt Pfenninger, PhD, Co-Founder of Chain Reaction Systems

Matt received his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. His career spans Silicon Valley, national laboratories, and decades of hands-on work in high-tech manufacturing and R&D.

Matt Pfenninger, PhD
Co-Founder

We're Manufacturing People First...We Get It.

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