Know where every tool build stands.
Lantern is project tracking for tooling programs. Every die, mold, and fixture you have in build — at every supplier — all on one shared, current picture, from kickoff to buyoff. Whether that’s 40 tools or 400.
The largest tooling programs on Lantern run hundreds of builds at once — at suppliers around the world, delivered to every major North American OEM. The tools tracked in Lantern are running in production today.
It’s your tool. You just can’t see it.
You know your production line cold. Parts per hour, changeovers, preventive maintenance — it’s scheduled, it’s measured, and when a line goes down, you know in minutes.
Tool builds are a different story. You’re in them every week — reviewing designs, answering questions, showing up for tryouts. But the work is happening in your supplier’s shop, sometimes an ocean away, and your visibility into it is a master spreadsheet somebody has to keep updated, email threads somebody has to dig back through, and a few people who just know which builds are really in trouble.
A tool build is never going to be as predictable as production. But it can be just as visible.
You shouldn’t have to go find out. The system should tell you.
Lantern reverses the direction of information. Instead of your people hunting for what they need to know, the program reports to them.
Your people know what’s theirs.
Every program manager and engineer opens Lantern to a personal queue of exactly what’s waiting on them — before anyone has to ask.
You see where every build stands — at every supplier.
Every tool, every milestone, every holdup, on one screen — whether the build is across town or across an ocean. The status meeting becomes a working meeting, because the status is already on the wall.
Your suppliers update the record, not your inbox.
Suppliers work in the same system: they submit deliverables, post progress, and answer to the same dates you see. When something changes, it changes for everyone at once — no version four of the spreadsheet.
A milestone isn’t done because somebody said it’s done.
In Lantern, milestones complete on evidence. “Designs complete” means the design file is in the system. “Machining on track” comes with photos from the floor. Steel quality comes with the hardness cert. Your suppliers submit the work itself — and your engineers review it and sign off before the milestone moves.
So when the board says a build is on schedule, that’s not optimism passed up the chain. It’s verified, and you can click through to the proof.
Kickoff
Simulation
Design
Machining
Assembly
Quality Loop
Buyoff
Ask about any tool. Get an answer — with the receipts.
Ask Lantern a question the way you’d ask a person: “Which builds are overdue at the supplier?” “What’s holding up the ROOF PANEL die?” “What changed on program 4088 this week?”
You get a straight answer built from your real project data — and every answer shows its work. It tells you exactly how it read your question, and every result links into the project itself, so you’re one click from the milestone, the file, or the holdup it’s talking about.
It’s not a chatbot bolted on the side. It’s the fastest way into your own data — and you can always check it.
Everyone starts the day knowing what’s theirs.
My Work is each person’s own slice of the program: every supplier submission waiting on their review, every approval waiting on their decision, everything coming due — and anything overdue, sorted worst-first at the top. Nobody has to remember. Nobody has to be reminded.
Open it in the morning, work the list, done. No digging through projects to find your pieces. No “just circling back on this” emails. When your part is done, it leaves your queue — and shows up in the next person’s.
A grid when you’re working. A timeline when you’re planning.
Lantern’s list view works the way your master spreadsheet does — one row per tool build, with every column you want: your fields, your statuses, your part numbers, sorted and filtered your way. The difference is that it’s live. Nobody maintains it, nobody emails around copies, and it never says “last updated three weeks ago.”
And when you need to see the program against the calendar, flip to the timeline — every build’s milestones laid out full-width, overlaps and crunch points visible at a glance. Same builds, same data. Switch as often as you like.
Built around tool builds, not adapted to them.
Lantern works at the buyer’s altitude: milestones, deliverables, approvals, dates — the level you actually manage a build at when the build isn’t in your building. The machine-level detail stays where it belongs, with your supplier.
Milestones run in parallel.
Design doesn’t wait for the last casting question, and neither does Lantern. Milestones overlap when the work overlaps — no pretending the program is a straight line.
One project, every workstream.
Tool build and fixture and gauge on the same project, each on its own track. One record, nothing entered twice, nothing to reconcile.
Your schedule and the customer’s schedule.
Track the timeline you actually run and the one you’ve committed to your customer — side by side on the same milestones. One workflow, both truths.
Templates per tool type.
A progressive die and a mold don’t follow the same checklist. Set up workflow variants per tool type, and every new project starts with the right one.
When your process changes, you change the system. Same day. No invoice.
Dashboards are built into Lantern, and your own admins build them — progress boards, workload views, boards with photos and files on them, every tile clicking through into the project behind it. When the program changes, you rearrange the board that afternoon. Nobody files a ticket. Nobody waits on a vendor.
Same with email notifications: your admins write the rules — who gets told, and when — and a sent log shows exactly what was delivered, to whom, at what time. When someone says “I never got that,” you can look it up.
Fields, statuses, workflows, dashboards, notifications — all yours to change. No custom-report backlog, no change orders, no per-tweak consulting hours. The cost you sign is the cost you run.
From the floor to the project in one tap.
At your supplier’s press for tryout and something’s not right? Take the photo — it lands in the project, attached to the right build, visible to your whole team before you’re back in the parking lot.
Supplier visits, homeline tryouts, buyoffs: Lantern works on the phone in your pocket, so what you saw becomes part of the record instead of part of an email you’ll write on the plane.
“Will my suppliers actually use this?”
Fair question — it’s the first one most buyers ask. The short answer: there’s a good chance yours already have. The largest tooling programs on Lantern source from die shops across North America and Asia, and much of that supply base has already submitted designs, posted progress, and closed milestones in it.
For the shops that are new to it: they see only their builds and only what you grant them, there’s nothing to install, and updating one record beats answering the same status email from three different people. It’s less chasing for them, too.
Everything else a program needs. Included.
- Controlled files
- — tracked documents with full revision history. The current rev is never in question.
- Approvals
- — submit, review, approve or send back with notes, item by item. Sign-offs live with the work.
- Issue tracking
- — log a problem against the build, assign it, resolve it. No side spreadsheet of open items.
- Search
- — find any build in seconds, by any field you track: tool number, part number, program, customer.
- Activity log
- — every change, who made it, when. The whole history of the build in one place.
- Your fields, your statuses
- — columns and statuses are yours to define. Lantern doesn’t tell you how to name things.
- Access control
- — suppliers and customers see exactly what you decide they see. Nothing more.
You won’t be handed a login and wished good luck.
Every Lantern customer is set up by us, with you: your workflows, your fields, your tool types, your people. Your team starts in a view they already understand — it looks like the spreadsheet they’ve been running for years — and grows into the rest at their own pace.
That’s why the button says request a demo instead of start free trial. You’ll be talking to people who know tooling programs, from the first call on.
- 1
We set it up with you
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Your team starts in familiar views
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You run it yourselves
Where your data lives
Lantern runs on Vercel and Supabase, and your data — the database and every file you upload — lives on AWS infrastructure in the United States. It’s encrypted in transit and at rest, and every customer’s data is isolated at the database layer: access rules are enforced by the database itself, not just the application, and a test suite fails our build if any table ever drops those rules. Suppliers and customers see only what you grant them, down to the individual milestone. Two-factor sign-in is built in and can be required across your whole organization.
One flow leaves that infrastructure: when you ask the built-in assistant a question, the project data needed to answer it is sent to Anthropic, whose models power it.
It’s your tool. Now you can see it.
A demo is a conversation with people who know tooling programs — not a webinar.