The data is on the floor. In the machines. In what your operators know. It just never makes it to you.
Manufacturing operational intelligence is the real-time capture of machine state, operator context, and production results, routed to the people who make decisions from it. MACH is the operational intelligence layer between your machines and your management.
Last updated: April 23, 2026
What do you actually know about last week's production numbers?
Last week's numbers land in your inbox. They don't match what you saw on the floor.
You spent Friday walking lines that fell behind. The report says 78% utilization. You know it wasn't 78%. Proving it requires a conversation nobody can give you a clean answer to. Which shift lost what, and why? Nobody has a clean answer.
You already know what happened. The data was there before the meeting.
Downtime by category. Operator-logged root causes. Schedule attainment by line and shift. Line 3's Thursday slippage was a changeover overrun on a material-grade switch. You caught it at 10am. Recovery was possible.
An order due Monday isn't going to finish in time.
You found out at 3pm Friday. Someone told you Line 4 had been behind since 9am. Shift ended at 4pm. You had one hour and a customer relationship on the line. The root cause? Nobody logged anything at the time.
The alert hit your phone at 9:15am. You called the floor. Problem solved by 10am.
By 9:12, Line 4 was an hour behind schedule. The alert hit your phone at 9:15. You called the floor, but the operator had already logged the reason. You pulled up the schedule, redistributed the remaining work across two lines, and the Monday order stayed on track. No overtime. No customer call.
Board deck is due Friday. You need a path to margin improvement. Without new capital.
Input costs are up. Customers won't absorb another price increase. The board is asking where the margin recovery comes from. You're looking at operational reports that tell you what happened, not what's possible. The numbers don't tell you where the gap actually is. Most can't distinguish a capacity problem from an execution problem. Those two things have very different answers.
The board slide writes itself. The data is already in the system.
You can see which problem is capacity and which is execution. And you can prove it. OEE by site. Schedule attainment trend. Capacity recovered without CapEx. That's how we unlocked 20% additional capacity with nominal CapEx for a major steel fabricator. When the board asks where the margin recovery comes from, the answer is already sitting in the system.
Your P&L has an invisible line item.
Standard costing tells you what products cost in theory. It doesn't see changeover frequency, scheduling disruption, material delays, or the overtime absorbed when a job takes longer than estimated. Those costs are real. They just don't have a line item. You're pricing products without knowing which ones are actually profitable and which ones your best work is subsidizing.
You can see what each product actually costs to produce, not what the model assumes.
MACH tracks machine time per unit, changeover time per order, and downtime per order. Standard costing misses all three. When you compare actual production cost against what you're charging, some products look different than you thought. The ones you've been quoting aggressively might be the ones eating your margin.
The problem isn't that the data doesn't exist. It just never makes it to you in a form you can act on.
Two-minute interruptions nobody logs.
Swapping a skid, clearing a jam. They never make it into a report. Individually they're noise. Collectively they're hours of lost production every week that no summary captures.
Machines running below rated speed, undetected.
The machine is running. The report says it's running. But it's producing at 72% of rated speed and nobody's dashboard can see the difference.
PLC data tells you what, not why.
The machine stopped. The log says "unplanned downtime." Not because anyone's being careless. Because the system never captured the operator's knowledge at the source.
Reporting on yesterday while today slips.
The summary arrives at 4:30pm. By then, the slippage that started at 10am has already become tomorrow's overtime and missed commitment.
A $5B steel manufacturer. 100+ facilities. Same problems you just read about.
Fragmented, incomplete, paper-based operational tracking. Inconsistent data across plants. Downtime events with no logged root cause. Schedules built on estimates that were always wrong. Plant managers spent their time reconciling unreliable reports instead of running the floor.
They couldn't answer fundamental questions about their own operation. Where is capacity actually being lost? Which jobs are profitable? Why does Plant A outperform Plant B?
Then they connected the floor to the data.
No new processing equipment. The capacity was already on the floor. It was invisible because the data to see it didn't exist. Within 90 days, schedule attainment improved. Within a year, the operation had a data foundation that made every future decision provable. (Kinetech case study, 2024)
Read the full case study →The schedule and the floor, connected.
Manufacturing operational intelligence is the real-time capture and routing of shop floor data: machine state, operator context, and production results, routed to the people who make decisions from it. MACH is the operational intelligence platform that connects directly to the PLC layer and works without a MES.
How long does this job actually take on Line 3 with this material? The answer is in your production history. If that history doesn't exist, the number in the schedule is someone's best guess.
MACH captures the history. The schedule gets built from what similar jobs actually took. Your machines, your materials, your floor.
- Live machine state feeds the schedule in real time
- Operator context captures the why behind every stop
- Duration predictions improve with every completed job
Built for the people who need it most.
When margins tighten, you need to understand where capacity is actually being lost.
Proving it requires a conversation nobody can give you a clean answer to. Which shift lost what, and why? Nobody has a clean answer. MACH gives you the answer before the conversation.
See the VP of Operations page →When leadership asks why performance was down, you need objective data. Not an explanation.
Shift visibility, defensibility, the 3pm discovery that should have been a 9am alert. You walk into the meeting with evidence. Not with a narrative.
See the Plant Manager page →The board is asking where the margin recovery comes from. Your reports can't tell you.
Most operations can't distinguish a capacity problem from an execution problem. Those two things have very different answers. MACH shows you which one you're dealing with. And proves it.
See the Executive page →The hardest part of CI isn't finding the problems. It's the ROI conversation.
Really it's two conversations. The one before where you need a credible number to get the budget. And the one after where someone asks you to prove it actually worked. Same problem both times: the baseline wasn't solid enough. When the baseline comes from actual production data off the machine, both conversations get easier. The baseline just exists. So does the proof.
See how a $5B manufacturer cut changeover by 45% →No MES? No problem.
MACH doesn't require an existing MES, ERP, or any other system. It connects directly to your machines and becomes the system of record from day one. If you have existing systems, MACH integrates with them. If you don't, MACH works standalone.
You know what your products cost in theory. Do you know what they cost to make?
Standard costing tells you what products should cost. It doesn't see changeover frequency between jobs, scheduling disruption from late material, overtime absorbed when a run takes longer than estimated, or the capacity consumed by your least profitable SKU. Those costs are real. They just don't show up in the model.
MACH captures the actual production data that makes true cost-to-serve visible. Which products are profitable. Which ones your best work is subsidizing. Which customers generate margin and which ones erode it. When you can see the real number, pricing decisions, product mix decisions, and customer strategy all change.
Cost-to-serve analytics is where MACH is headed next. The production data captured by Monitoring and Scheduling today is the foundation. When cost-to-serve reporting ships, the data is already there. No new implementation required.
$500K–$2M figure: Kinetech customer benchmark based on early deployment data.
What manufacturers ask before deploying MACH.
Does MACH require an existing MES or ERP?
No. MACH connects directly to the machine layer via PLC and works as a standalone system of record from day one. If you have an existing MES or ERP, MACH integrates with it. If you don't, MACH works without one.
How does MACH connect to machines on the shop floor?
MACH connects to machines via an edge gateway installed on-site that reads from the PLC layer. The connection is outbound-only, so it works within standard IT security policies without firewall exceptions. No inbound ports required.
What does MACH cost?
MACH is priced flat per work center per month on annual billing. MACH Schedule is $150/wc/mo, MACH Monitor is $270/wc/mo, MACH Complete is $357/wc/mo (15% bundle discount versus Schedule and Monitor separately). Same flat rate whether you run 5 or 100 work centers. Above 100, contact sales for custom pricing. See full pricing.
What production data does MACH capture?
MACH captures machine state (running, idle, down), operator-logged downtime root causes, production counts per job, changeover time per order, and schedule attainment by line and shift. All data is available in real time before the shift ends.
How long does MACH implementation take?
MACH deployments begin with a 90-day proof of concept with defined scope and measurement window. Most production monitoring deployments are live within the first 30 days of the POC.
We only come on-site if the call confirms a genuine fit.
The meter is running. Book a diagnostic.
We run a Shop Floor Diagnostic against your floor. One-hour call to understand your situation, then a written assessment of where your losses actually are.
Either outcome is professionally defensible. If the numbers justify action, you have the case. If they don't, you have the data.