“The Monty” Speaks With “Sefi Grossman” of Heat Treat Software “Combustion OS”
(Editors Note; This interview refers several times to the recent acquisitions of Visual Shop/Cornerstone and Bluestreak. Details of these acquisitions can be found at Major Acquisitions for Heat Treatment Software Supplier).
The reported acquisitions of Visual Shop/Cornerstone and BlueStreak have created uncertainty for heat treaters that rely on those systems. The Monty’s Gord Montgomery spoke with Sefi Grossman of Combustion OS about his thoughts in this changing market for heat treaters. His company and product, Combustion OS, offers a heat-treat-specific operating system can take an operation well beyond a traditional ERP.
GORD: Hello Sefi, it seems this interview is very timely with the buzz going on, but first, how did you get into this business of heat treating and software for heat treaters?
Our journey into heat treating started when we connected with a local commercial heat treater that was looking for something custom beyond Visual Shop. They needed a more modern, flexible solution that could adapt to their operation instead of forcing their operation to adapt to the software. As we immersed ourselves in the industry, we realized this wasn’t an isolated challenge. We saw a significant technology gap across heat treating, with many facilities relying on legacy systems that hadn’t evolved alongside today’s manufacturing, automation, and data capabilities.
That realization sparked something bigger than a single customer project. Together, we decided to invest in understanding the industry, working alongside heat treaters, and building technology specifically for their needs. That journey ultimately led to Combustion OS—a platform built to help move the heat treating industry forward with modern software, automation, and real-time operational visibility.
GORD: Sefi, I am hearing a lot of “buzz” about the two major heat treat operations software platforms being merged. There seems to be some concerns out there. What are you hearing from heat treaters?
SEFI: First, Visual Shop and BlueStreak have served this industry for many years, and many successful heat-treating companies depend on them every day. This is not about criticizing those products or the people who built them.
What I am hearing now is uncertainty. Shops are trying to understand what will happen to the systems they currently use, what their future deployment choices will be, and whether they will be required to move to a different platform or commercial model.
There are also broader efforts underway within the industry to evaluate alternatives. I think that is healthy. Changing a core operating system is a major decision, and companies should be able to compare platforms, deployment models, transition plans, and long-term relationships before committing.
I do not want to speculate about another company’s intentions or repeat every rumor circulating in the market. But concerns about migration pressure, pricing, cloud-only delivery, and year-end timelines are clearly causing shops to take a closer look at their options.
Our message is simple: customers deserve a choice. Combustion OS can preserve the functionality they rely on today while giving them a much broader path forward.
GORD: For someone hearing about Combustion OS for the first time, is it another ERP system?
SEFI: It can perform the core functions shops expect from an ERP, but that is only the starting point.
Combustion OS supports the complete lifecycle from quoting through invoicing. That includes customer and part history, receiving, recipes and process control, scheduling, lot tracking, quality documentation, certifications, shipping, invoicing, and accounting integration.
That parity is important because a company cannot improve its operation if the transition disrupts the work it already performs every day. We first have to make sure the essentials are handled correctly.
From there, Combustion OS reaches much deeper into the operation. It connects the job to the process, equipment, employees, documentation, quality requirements, maintenance, laboratory work, training, and management information surrounding it. That is why we call it an operating system rather than simply an ERP.
GORD: What makes it specific to heat treating?
SEFI: Heat treating has its own language, risks, equipment, documentation, and process requirements. A generic manufacturing ERP may be able to rename fields, but that does not necessarily mean it understands how a heat-treating operation works.
Combustion OS was built around heat treating. We understand that the same part can have different recipes, specifications, approvals, testing, and certification requirements. We understand furnaces, loads, lots, process parameters, pyrometry, traceability, and the importance of preserving exactly what happened to a job.
We can also connect directly with equipment, PLCs, scales, scanners, printers, and other shop-floor devices. Instead of treating production as a separate world, the system can connect what was planned, what the operator did, and what the equipment recorded.
Every heat-treat shop is also different. Our job is not to force all of them into one rigid workflow. We start with proven heat-treat building blocks and configure them around how each shop actually operates.
GORD: On August 20, you will be speaking at the Artificial Intelligence in Heat Treat Executive Seminar near Pittsburgh. Can you give us a sneak peek at what you will be talking about?
SEFI: The seminar is being presented by Wingens Consultants in partnership with HTT, and it brings together experts from heat treating, robotics, process control, cybersecurity, law, and artificial intelligence.
My part of the conversation will focus on practical AI in heat treating. There is a lot of excitement surrounding AI, but I want to show where it can create value in a real operation today, where human review remains essential, and why AI becomes much more useful when it is connected to the operating system instead of being treated as a separate novelty.
That is the same approach we are taking inside Combustion OS: using AI to remove repetitive work, improve consistency, and help people make better decisions.
At receiving, AI can read bills of lading and customer paperwork, identify relevant information, and use it to help create the work order. An employee validates the information before it becomes part of the permanent record.
For training, the system can use a company’s approved procedures and documents to generate quizzes and reinforce understanding. Managers remain responsible for reviewing and approving the material.
AI-assisted quoting is also available today. It can help interpret incoming quote requests, organize requirements, identify relevant historical information, and prepare the foundation of a quote for review. The goal is to reduce the time spent gathering and re-entering information while preserving human responsibility for pricing, process selection, and final approval.
We are also applying local and edge-based machine learning to equipment and process information where appropriate. That creates opportunities to identify patterns and unusual conditions without requiring every piece of operational data to leave the customer’s environment.
The important point is that AI does not replace accountability. It assists the person doing the work, while the employee or manager remains in control of the decision.
GORD: How far beyond traditional ERP does the system extend?
SEFI: Production is central, but a heat-treating company is an entire connected operation. Combustion OS can support employee readiness and training, preventive maintenance, laboratory activity, quality systems, document control, dashboards, and operational KPIs.
Each recipe has data points and the data coming from the machine can help make critical decisions in quoting and pricing and even scheduling. That connection allows the system to surface relationships that are easy to miss. Is a recurring delay (furnace not loaded or unloaded, for example) related to a particular process, equipment issue, documentation requirement, or training gap? Are people spending time coordinating something that could be automated? The more of the operation that is connected, the better the opportunity to understand and improve it.
GORD: Some shops want the cloud, while others want their system kept inside the facility. What choices do you offer?
SEFI: Combustion OS can be deployed in the cloud, on premises, or in a hybrid model. The correct choice depends on the customer’s operation, security requirements, infrastructure, and tolerance for an internet interruption.
Cloud hosting can be very effective. But a plant should not lose the ability to receive work, run equipment, or ship product because its internet connection is down. An on-premises or hybrid design can keep critical functions operating locally while still supporting secure remote access and cloud services where they add value.
Local or carefully designed hybrid deployment can also make CMMC compliance easier for customers performing government or Department of Defense work. Keeping sensitive data and critical operations inside a defined, controlled environment can simplify the system boundary, reduce unnecessary exposure, and make access controls and audit evidence easier to manage.
It does not make a company CMMC compliant by itself, but it can provide a cleaner foundation for meeting those requirements.
The customer also owns its data. We are not interested in trapping a customer by making its information inaccessible. The system uses an open SQL foundation, and the deployment should support the customer’s operational and security needs.
GORD: Can a Visual Shop or BlueStreak customer realistically transition before the end of 2026?
SEFI: For a qualified shop, yes. But it has to be approached carefully, and we would never promise a date without understanding the scope and condition of the data.
We begin with a confidential transition review. We map what the shop uses today and divide it into three groups: what must be there for day one, what should be improved during the transition, and what can follow later.
For many shops, the initial core is receiving, inventory, shipping, invoicing, and light scheduling. We map and validate the data, preserve necessary history, test the business rules, train operators, and run the new system in parallel before cutover. Depending on scope and customer participation, that initial phase may be achievable in roughly 60 to 90 days.
Our objective is to create an “easy button” for the transition—not by pretending migration is effortless, but by doing the difficult mapping and validation work up front. Qualified shops can go live before December 31, 2026, provided we have timely data access, a controlled scope, and active customer participation.
GORD: We have talked extensively about the system, but tell us about the company and the people behind Combustion OS.
SEFI: Combustion OS is built on our Alpha platform, which, simply explained, is an enterprise systems builder that we have developed and continuously enhanced over the past 11 years. Alpha gives us a mature, stable foundation for building connected business and operational systems without having to start from scratch each time.
We used that foundation to create Combustion OS specifically for heat treaters. That distinction is important: the underlying platform has been developed and proven over many years, but Combustion OS has a deliberately narrow focus. We are not trying to build generic software for every industry. We work directly with heat treaters, listen to the problems they are trying to solve, and build practical tools around how their people and processes actually work.
I am a problem solver by nature. I enjoy walking into an operation, talking with the people doing the work, and finding the places where better information, software, or automation can make their jobs easier. Our team shares that mindset. We have people who build software, connect equipment, map workflows, and work directly with operators and management. The technology matters, but understanding the operation comes first.
We are privately owned and are not controlled by venture capital or private equity. That allows us to make decisions based on what creates lasting value for our customers instead of following an investment timetable or forcing every shop into the same commercial model.
We believe this is a marathon, not a sprint. If a customer needs us to sprint during an implementation, we will sprint with them. But the relationship is intended to last for years. We expect to keep learning from the customer, improving the system, and finding opportunities together long after the initial go-live.
We also do not want customers afraid to give another employee access because every login creates another fee. Software should help knowledge move through the company. Our goal is to become a trusted, long-term partner—one that understands the shop and continues helping it improve, not simply a vendor that installs software and disappears.
GORD: You have said that some of your best ideas came from mistakes. Can you give us an example?
SEFI: Absolutely. One of our biggest breakthroughs began as one of our biggest misses.
We were developing the first version of what became our Process Control and Recipe Sheet. The customer gave us five example parts, and we built a slick web interface around them. We went away for about a month, came back, and demonstrated it. The customer loved it.
Before we left, though, they asked one simple question: “How do we adapt this to the other 500 variations?”
My heart sank. We had built five very nice solutions, but we had not built a scalable system. I left that meeting feeling defeated.
Once I got past that feeling, the failure forced us to look at the problem differently. Instead of programming a separate screen for every variation, we developed what became our Alpha form system: a flexible, key/value-driven visual system that can reproduce a customer’s existing forms and workflows almost exactly.
That solved more than the original problem. Because the digital forms look familiar, training became nearly seamless. The system could also maintain value history, revisions, validations, approvals, and audit trails—things paper forms could never do reliably.
What looked like a huge miss became one of the crown-jewel modules of Combustion OS.
It also changed how we work. Five examples may show you what a process looks like, but they do not necessarily reveal the system behind it. Today we spend much more time looking for the variations, exceptions, and edge cases before deciding how something should be built.
You cannot improve a process you have only seen in a conference room. You have to understand how the people doing the work actually use it, where it changes, and why those differences exist.
GORD: Can you share an example of finding an improvement the customer had not necessarily recognized?
SEFI: At one operation, experienced people were manually coordinating furnace activities that the system could coordinate automatically. As we studied the workflow, we uncovered a significant labor-savings opportunity by connecting the equipment, schedule, process rules, and operator actions.
We are implementing that automation now, so I would not present the savings as a completed result yet. What the analysis revealed was how much time the shop was spending simply keeping information moving and coordinating routine decisions manually.
The opportunity is not just about reducing labor. It is about reducing the shop’s dependence on a few individuals carrying the operation in their heads. As the new workflow is implemented, those experienced people will be able to spend more time handling exceptions, improving quality, and optimizing the process instead of constantly keeping the basic workflow moving.
That is the difference between digitizing paperwork and improving an operation.
We are not trying to reproduce every old step on a screen. We want to understand why the step exists and whether software, automation, or AI can make the work simpler, safer, and more useful.
GORD: What should a Visual Shop or BlueStreak customer do if they are evaluating their options?
SEFI: Do not panic, but do not wait until the last minute either. Start by documenting the workflows, data, integrations, and historical information your operation depends on. Then take the time to understand what your real options are.
We will be at Furnaces North America in Indianapolis in mid October. If you would like to see whether Combustion OS could support your operation and provide a realistic transition path, go to CombustionOS.com and click “Book a Demo.”
We will take the time to understand your shop, show you what the system can do today, and discuss what a safe transition could look like. It is a working conversation—not a high-pressure
GORD: With today’s AI tools, what are your thoughts about “vibe coding” – or having someone’s nephew build a custom system as an alternative?
SEFI: The AI development tools available today are incredible. We use them ourselves to accelerate onboarding, integrations, testing, and development. In experienced hands, they can make a strong team much faster.
The risk is confusing speed with simplicity. A vibe-coded application may look great and work well during the initial demonstration. Problems appear when it encounters a situation nobody prompted for – a process exception, conflicting data, a security requirement, an equipment failure, or one of the hundreds of variations that exist in a real heat-treat operation.
If the person who created it does not understand what is happening inside the black box, troubleshooting and maintaining it can become difficult very quickly. In our industry, software also has to preserve traceability, validation, access controls, revisions, and audit evidence. Those responsibilities do not disappear because AI helped write the code.
AI is a powerful development accelerator, but it is not a replacement for experience, architecture, testing, and accountability. Personally, I would not want a vibe coder sitting on the other side of the table from an auditor – but that is just me.