Plan on measured cycle times
What each operation actually takes on each machine, recorded continuously. The plan gets built from the times the floor produces rather than the times it was given.
By job role
Plan on the times the machines actually run.
Every schedule is built on standards, and standards drift the moment tooling, material or people change. Output IQ measures what each job really takes, so the plan is built from the floor rather than from a spreadsheet.
- No implementation fee
- Rolling monthly
- Thirty days to change your mind
- UK hosted
Live capacityLive
Capacity free
This week
108
Prev week86 hrs↑ 25.6% Committed412 hrs↓ 73.8%
Schedule adherence
Whole site
91
Prev week87%↑ 4.6% Target85%↑ 7.1%
Cycle time variance
Against standard
6
Prev month11%↓ 45.5% Tolerance5%↑ 20.0%
The problem
You are planning against numbers nobody has checked.
Standards get set once and inherited forever. Tooling changes, material changes, people change, and the plan carries on assuming the times it was given years ago.
01
Capacity is an educated guess
Deciding whether a big order fits means adding up hours that were booked rather than hours that ran. Those two numbers are rarely the same and only one of them is real.
02
A slipping job is discovered, not predicted
The date moves when somebody notices. If a job has been running slow since Tuesday, Friday is too late to find out and too late to move anything.
03
Setup and changeover are invisible
Changeovers are usually estimated once and never measured again. On a busy cell that is hours a week the plan never accounts for.
What you get
A plan built on real times, not standards.
See capacity as it frees up
A machine finishing early shows as available hours straight away, so work can be pulled forward while there is still a shift to pull it into.
Catch a job slipping the same day
Progress comes from the machine rather than from a booking sheet. A job behind on hours flags while there is still time to add a shift or move the sequence.
Measure setup and changeover properly
Changeovers are timed rather than estimated. Sequencing to minimise them stops being a theory and becomes a number you can plan against.
Promise dates you can actually hold
A date built from measured capacity and measured run rates is a date you can defend to a customer, and one you are far less likely to have to apologise for.
Where the numbers come from
Four sources, one figure.
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.
The ERP
Orders, stock, purchasing and finance. What was sold, what it was quoted at and what was bought to make it.
Mobile job tracking
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.
Connected sensors
Power, vibration, heat, pressure and run hours, straight off the machine. Nothing to key in and nothing to remember.
A plan that matches the floor
Measured run rates, measured changeovers and live capacity. The schedule stops being an opinion about the future and starts being a forecast.
Capacity free this week 108 Uncommitted machine hours, updated live
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
The same feed, read a different way.
- Owners and directorsKnow what it costs to run.
- ProductionFull control of your shop floor in real time.
- OperatorsAll the upside, none of the extra work.
- EngineeringEfficiency from hard data, not guesswork.
- MaintenanceCatch it before it becomes a breakdown.
- QualityEvidence for every batch, not assumptions.
- FinanceReal costs now, not at month end.
- Health and safetyEquipment condition, watched continuously.
- FacilitiesThe utilities nobody meters.
Questions
The ones planners ask.
Does this replace our scheduling?
It can, or it can feed it. Either way what it adds is measured run rates and live capacity, which is the input scheduling has always been missing.
How are cycle times measured?
From the machine itself and from jobs booked on and off at the terminal, so a time is what actually happened rather than what somebody remembered.
Can it handle a mixed cell?
Yes. Times are recorded per operation per machine, so the same part made on two machines gets two honest rates rather than one averaged one.
What about jobs that are not on a monitored machine?
Those are still tracked through mobile job booking. The machine data adds accuracy where a sensor is fitted, it is not a condition of planning the work.
How far ahead can I see capacity?
As far as your order book runs. Committed and free hours are calculated from live progress rather than from the original estimate.
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