A practical guide for plants with 10–150 people: what shop floor management software has to cover, where point solutions stop paying off, how to score vendors, the order to roll it out in, and how connecting floor data to strategy is what actually moves OEE.
The demo opens a read-only manufacturer workspace with your email — no password, no card.
Most small manufacturers do not lack data — they lack a daily routine that turns a bad hour into a decision. Before you look at vendors, write down which of these hurts most: nobody knows the plant is red until the month closes, losses are argued about instead of counted, actions from the morning meeting evaporate, or the board pack takes two days to assemble. Your answer determines whether you need a tracking tool, a management system, or MES-class machine integration.
A point solution solves one of those four problems well. An integrated system solves all four with one data set, which matters because the loss you coded at 10am is the same number that has to justify capex in the board review. The honest trade-off: point tools win on speed to first value and per-line price; integrated systems win on total cost once you count the spreadsheets, the re-keying and the version arguments they remove. For plants under roughly 150 people, the spreadsheet tax is usually larger than the licence difference.
Take this into demos and make each vendor show it live rather than describe it. Anything that needs a services engagement to configure is a cost you have not been quoted yet.
Software adoption on the floor fails when the first ask is data entry with no visible return. Sequence it so the crew sees something useful before they are asked for anything more.
OEE improves when the top loss on the Pareto becomes somebody's objective with a funded countermeasure, not when it is displayed more attractively. That link only exists if shop floor data flows upward into the same system that holds strategic objectives, KPI targets and the action tracker. Keeping the floor loop and the strategy loop in different tools is the most common reason a well-run daily meeting produces a flat OEE trend year after year.
Every failed shop floor rollout we see repeats at least two of these. They cost far more than the licence decision you are agonising over.
At minimum it should run the daily meeting (visual SQDP status by value stream), capture output hour by hour against plan, code losses so a Pareto builds itself, and carry unresolved problems into an escalation with a named owner and a due date. Anything that only reports after the fact is a dashboard, not a management system.
A point tool (an OEE box, a downtime app, a digital whiteboard) is quicker to install and cheaper per line, but it leaves you re-keying numbers into the weekly and monthly reviews. An integrated system costs a little more attention up front and pays back when the same figure the operator logged appears in the board pack without anyone rebuilding it.
Expect per-user or per-site subscriptions rather than the six-figure implementations quoted for MES. The number that matters is total first-year cost including setup fees, integration work and training days. DO.Impact charges no setup fee and starts with a free 7-day sandbox.
No. Most small manufacturers get the majority of the value from manual hour-by-hour entry plus honest loss coding, because the constraint is usually decision speed rather than data resolution. Add machine signals later, once people trust the routine and you know which lines justify the wiring.
Teams that log losses consistently normally see the first Pareto stabilise within three to four weeks — long enough for the top two or three loss codes to become undeniable. The improvement follows the countermeasures, not the software, so plan the first two problem-solving cycles into the rollout.
Open the read-only demo workspace first — a complete manufacturer with boards, jobs, KPIs and a full board report. Then start the free 7-day sandbox with your own numbers.