There is one thing that's killing them, where they could stand to automate. Their sales and purchase-order process is also still manual; people answering email

There is one thing that's killing them, where they could stand to automate. Their sales and purchase-order process is also still manual; people answering emails by hand and filling out (literal carbon paper) triplicate work orders. But their aerospace customers have gone to zero-inventory kanban-style resource management, and that's a system that assumes a certain level of automation. We're talking companies placing orders by machine that then auto-generates the emails, where an email at 9AM says they need 400 of a widget by next month, an order update at 1PM says to cancel 200 of those, another update at 3PM says add an additional 500, and a final update at 6PM says cancel-whole-order, some planes just got delayed, we'll pay the $100 cancellation penalty. None of that scales. It just runs the sales team ragged (literally; they're literally running out to the factory floor to find the third carbon copy and yank it from the production queue by thumbing through the queue).