By job role
Owners and directors of UK manufacturers are running on numbers that arrive weeks late. Output IQ measures what your machines actually did, what it cost, and what capacity you paid for and did not use, from the floor upward.
The problem
Every figure that reaches a director has been through somebody. It is typed up, rounded off, chased, and delivered after the month has closed. The decisions it should have informed were made three weeks earlier on a feeling.
Quoting a big order means guessing whether you have the hours. Nobody knows how many hours the machines actually ran last month, only how many they were booked for.
One bill arrives for the whole site. Nothing tells you which machine, which shift or which job spent it, so the only lever available is turning things off.
Most quotes are still priced off a rate somebody set years ago. When a job loses money it usually shows up as a smaller margin at year end, not as a job you can name.
What you get
Every machine reports what it draws, all the time. You see the compressor running at two in the morning, the oven left on over a weekend and the line that idles through every break, priced in pounds rather than kilowatts.
Vibration, heat and run hours are watched continuously against limits you set. A bearing going takes weeks to fail and minutes to notice, so the work gets planned into a gap instead of stopping a shift.
Consumption by machine, by area and by site, recorded as it happens. The evidence an ISO 14001 audit or a customer sustainability questionnaire asks for is already there rather than reconstructed from bills.
The people running the machines see the same numbers you do. Problems get raised with evidence attached, which is the difference between a complaint and a case for change.
Stoppages are logged as they happen, with a reason, against the job that was running. Ranked over weeks, that is a list of what to fix in order of what it costs you.
Machine hours, energy and labour land against the work that used them, so the margin on a job is calculated rather than assumed, and the next quote is priced on what the last one really took.
Where the numbers come from
None of this is typed in by anybody. The number you look at is assembled from the parts of the business that already produce it.
Orders, stock, purchasing and finance. What was sold, what it was quoted at and what was bought to make it.
Jobs booked on and off from a phone or a tablet on the floor. Labour lands against the job as it happens, not on a timesheet at the end of the week.
Power, vibration, heat, pressure and run hours, straight off the machine. Nothing to key in and nothing to remember.
One figure, traceable
Joined and costed automatically. Every number on this page can be taken back to the machine, the shift and the job that produced it.
In practice
Measured, anonymised results will be published here as our first deployments report them. Nothing invented goes on this page in the meantime.
The rest of the business
Questions
Timing. Management accounts tell you what happened five weeks ago, once the month is closed and the journals are posted. This tells you what is happening while you can still do something about it, and it reconciles to the same numbers when the month does close.
Days rather than months. Sensors clip on without rewiring, the floor terminals need no installation, and the first capacity and energy figures appear as soon as the first machines are fitted. The full picture builds as more of the operation comes on.
No. Output IQ feeds the accounting package you already use rather than replacing it, and the sensors sit alongside whatever controls your machines already have.
There is no implementation fee, the contract is rolling monthly, and you have thirty days to change your mind. Sensor hardware can be bought outright or rented per machine per month, so the capital decision is yours rather than ours.
It tells you what you would need to know to decide. How many hours your existing machines actually run against the hours you pay for, what an hour on each one really costs, and how much of the gap is idle time you are already funding.
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Explore how Output IQ can empower your business, from automated ERP and MRP to live data analysis and sensors. Service before Software.