Your ERP system tells you what should happen. Your P&L statement tells you what did happen. Without real-time production monitoring, you are blind to what is happening right now. Kinetech moves you beyond vanity metrics. We digitize the whole work center by combining raw machine data with critical human context. Eliminate blind spots. Expose the invisible killers of productivity. Protect your gross margins in an era of rising costs.
A common objection to digital transformation is the age of the equipment. Do not let legacy hardware stall your progress. Kinetech employs a flexible connectivity strategy that respects your IT security and your physical constraints.
NON-INVASIVE SENSORS
For older machines without modern controllers or machines with closed systems, we leverage simple, physical sensors such as current transducers (CTs). These clamp around a power cable to detect when a motor is running or idle without modifying the machine’s wiring.
DIRECT EDGE INTEGRATION
For modern equipment, we connect directly to PLCs via standard industrial protocols (OPC-UA, Ethernet/IP, Modbus, etc.). This extracts granular data beyond simple uptime, such as cycle counts, speeds, physical material measurements, and error codes.
IT-APPROVED SECURITY
We respect the air gap between IT and OT. Our solutions are built on Mendix and hosted on AWS or Azure, ensuring enterprise-grade security and high availability without exposing your industrial network to the open internet.
The manufacturing landscape has shifted. Today, manufacturers face a new reality where input costs (labor, raw materials, and energy) are rising, yet the market has reached "price fatigue." Your customers are fighting price increases and looking to your competitors.
The only sustainable path forward is to extract more value from your existing floor.
Most operational leaders rely on a fragmented view of reality. You have the "plan" in your ERP and the "result" in your financial reports. Between those two bookends lies the "Operational Blind Spot", the shift-by-shift reality of the shop floor. When you rely on manual logs, whiteboards, or yesterday’s Excel spreadsheets, you miss the critical moments that erode profitability:
The Micro-Stops: The two-minute interruptions that happen dozens of times per day but never get logged.
The "Slow Roll": Machines running at reduced speeds due to quality or maintenance issues, to boost KPIs, or to extend work to fill a shift.
The Context Gap: Knowing a machine stopped, but not knowing it was because the operator was waiting 20 minutes for material handling.
Kinetech closes this gap. We turn the "black box" of your production floor into a transparent, data-driven environment.
Different roles require different wins. While executive leadership focuses on margin preservation and multi-site consistency, plant managers fight daily battles to manage production schedules. Select your role to see how we transform raw production data into your specific definition of success.
The Goal: Margin protection and consistent performance between multiple sites.
The Reality: You cannot be at every plant every day. You need a standardized view of performance to understand which facilities are best-in-class and which require your focus.
The Kinetech Value: We provide a unified data standard across all plants. Whether you are managing one plant or one hundred plants, you gain high-level visibility into asset utilization and cost-to-serve. You can finally answer the difficult questions: "How do we best deploy CapEx? What is our cost to serve different customers? How well are we truly utilizing our assets?"
The Goal: Schedule attainment and operational control.
The Reality: Your day is often defined by "firefighting." You spend hours chasing down why orders are late or why a machine is down, often finding out too late to attain the day’s schedule.
The Kinetech Value: We replace subjective opinions with objective data. Know you are behind schedule, while there is still time to re-allocate resources and engage with customers proactively. We give you the data you need to justify headcount or equipment investments to leadership
The Goal: Data-driven waste reduction.
The Reality: You cannot prove the ROI and success of a CI event if you do not have an accurate baseline. Manual time studies are a snapshot, not a movie.
The Kinetech Value: We provide the automated, granular data you need to identify bottlenecks and validate your improvements. Prove that your process changes generated real, sustained productivity improvements and cost savings.
The Problem with Major Breakdowns
Everyone notices when a critical asset fails for four hours. It is an emergency. Resources are deployed. The problem is fixed.
The Problem with Micro-Stops
Few people notice the short, frequent stops. The machine jams for two minutes. The operator waits three minutes for a pallet. A sensor is blocked for ninety seconds. These "micro-stops" often accumulate to hours of lost production every week, yet they feel "normal" to the operator. Because they are short, they are rarely logged in manual reports.
The Kinetech Solution:
By monitoring the machine state, we account for all stops and categorize them, no matter how brief. This exposes the silent killers of your capacity and allows you to address the root cause and reclaim hours of productivity - without buying new equipment.
Why Asset Utilization Can Be a Misleading Metric
Asset Utilization is the gold standard for many, but it can be misleading if it lacks context.
Example: An operator might run a machine at reduced speed to avoid downtime events, bottlenecks, quality issues, or to fill a shift. The machine’s utilization looks high (the machine rarely stops), but the speed is destroying your throughput. On paper, the workcenter looks productive. In reality, you are losing money.
OEE attempts to address this through Availability, Performance, and Quality factors, but if your shift schedules, product mix, and customer requirements frequently vary, it can be extremely difficult, or even impossible, to calculate systematically.
The Kinetech Solution:
We track the Whole Work Center. This means we monitor the machine's relevant properties AND the human context (who is logged in, what job is active, why has the machine stopped). We allow you to systematically and automatically calculate KPIs relevant to you (run rate, utilization, OEE, changeover times) and provide the proper context to evaluate them.
The Problem with Reports:
Most manufacturing reports describe what happened yesterday or last month. They are a static snapshotof the past. They do not tell you if you are winning or losing right now.
The Kinetech Solution:
Our dashboards act as a portal to real-time operations—like watching live TV.
Visual Management: Large screens on the shop floor show the team exactly where they stand against the goal.
Remote Visibility: Leadership can view the exact status of any asset from a phone or laptop, anywhere in the world.
Immediate Accountability: When the blinders come off, productivity improves immediately, and constructive discussions and actions can occur using objective data instead of opinions.
Kinetech bridges the gap between OT (Operational Technology) and IT. By equipping operators with mobile-first interfaces, we capture the critical human context that raw data lacks.
Machine Issues
A motor overheated. This requires immediate maintenance intervention and time to resolve.
Process Issues
The Operator is waiting for a forklift. This requires material handling support, not machine repair.
Scheduling Issues
The changeover took too long. This indicates materials were not staged correctly and requires better planning.
Why This Matters for CapEx:
Without this context, you might spend $250,000 to upgrade a machine to run faster or purchase additional machines, only to realize the machine was never the bottleneck. It was simply waiting on the world around it most of the time. Our methodology contextualizes your data to inform decision-making and make CapEx deployments as effective as possible.
In a high-mix manufacturing environment, not all orders are created equal. Two orders might generate the same revenue, but one might require triple the machine time, labor, and changeovers.
Without granular production data, accounting relies on "blended averages" and standards to estimate costs. This hides the reality that complex, custom orders often destroy margins. You could be losing money on 10% of your volume without knowing it.
By tracking the exact start and stop times of every job—down to the second—we allow you to allocate labor and overhead costs to specific orders.
Accurate Quoting: Stop guessing. Use historical data to quote complex jobs quickly and with precision.
Margin Protection: Identify the "losers" in your product mix and either re-price them or operationalize them differently.
Strategic Decisions: Empower your sales team to defend price increases with irrefutable data on production reality.
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Reliance on fragmented paper records and siloed machine data prevented a major manufacturer from establishing standardized KPIs or gaining real-time shop floor visibility. This data gap forced leadership to rely on lagging financial metrics, hindering cost-reduction efforts and precluding advanced predictive modeling.
We delivered a custom application ecosystem that securely aggregated real-time machine telemetry with critical operator context. This solution preserved their existing workflows while adding a strategic single source of truth for immediate organization-wide visibility.
Operational Stability: Improved OTD and consistency via standardized best practices.
Model the high-level financial impact of shop floor monitoring across your entire enterprise. This calculator translates operational gains into bottom-line growth.
Key Insights:
Annual EBITDA Impact
Margin Improvement
Dive into the day-to-day economics of your facility. Calculate exactly how much "hidden" capacity you can unlock by reducing downtime and changeover friction.
Key Insights:
Weekly & Monthly Labor Hours Saved
Annual Savings per Machine
If you manage your production schedule on a whiteboard or a spreadsheet, you are reacting to the past. A spreadsheet does not update itself when a machine goes down at 10:00 AM. This leaves your planning team operating on a schedule that is already obsolete by lunch.
❌ Blind Spots
You do not know a schedule is slipping until the shift is over.
✅ Visual Planning
See exactly where every order is in the queue in real-time.
❌ Missed Promises
Sales teams promise dates based on "standard lead times" rather than actual capacity.
✅ Dynamic Adjustments
If a work center goes down, drag-and-drop orders to available lines instantly.
❌ Manual Shuffle
Rescheduling requires hours of manual data entry and phone calls to the floor.
✅ Proactive Communication
Know hours in advance if a shipment will be late. Manage the customer expectation proactively rather than asking for forgiveness.
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"The software was already built. We could see exactly how it would work for us." - VP Operations
"We build software around your process—not the other way around." - Ricky Volz, Kinetech Partner
Discuss your challenges and identify what makes your operations unique.
See a working proof of concept of your specific workflows within weeks.
Calculate the cost of existing operational inefficiencies and the potential ROI of adopting a Kinetech solution.
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