Every manufacturer’s chasing the same thing: operational excellence. But the biggest goal is also the biggest challenge—how do you do more with less?
The good news: You don’t need more machines, people, or hours in the day. You need visibility. Because hidden capacity is already there—you just have to unlock it.
Here’s how.
There are three key moves to reclaim wasted production time: understand your real baselines, reset your expectations, and tackle your biggest downtime drivers.
Let’s get into it.
The first step? Stop guessing.
You need a clear, data-driven view of how your plant is actually performing—minute by minute, shift by shift. This means finding a way to automate data collection, because manual tracking is often inaccurate and outdated by the time it comes into play.
That’s where Amper comes in. By pulling real-time data from your machines and operators, Amper shows you exactly what’s happening on the floor. You’ll see:
For example, if you think you’re at 75% utilization but you’re actually running at 25%, it’s time to reassess your processes. Amper helps you spot that gap, figure out why it exists, and close it.
“When we saw the data for the first time, we had this immediate ‘wow’ moment. If we didn’t have Amper, we wouldn’t have that real-time, high-quality data coming from the shop floor.”
— Nick Sainati, GM, Belden Universal
Once you have real numbers, you can set real goals. And these aren’t vague goals based on gut feelings. They’re data-backed targets that your team can track progress against, one shift at a time.
Amper makes performance metrics easy to access and even easier to act on. Your supervisors can track progress daily and make adjustments on the fly to get things back on track when needed.
And when you share data with your team, it doesn’t just improve visibility—it builds buy-in and fuels motivation to improve. (Some even use the data to gamify the process and establish incentive structures.)
Downtime is efficiency’s #1 enemy. But with plant-wide visibility, you can finally discover not just how many hours a machine was down—but also the who, what, when, where, and why.
When you start tracking downtime, it’s crucial to label as many downtime events as possible. This is what’s actually going to allow you to plan focused, high-impact continuous improvement projects.
With Amper, you can create custom downtime labels, track dollar-value losses, and even estimate savings from CI projects—so you know exactly where to focus and what’s worth fixing.
No more educated guesses. Just real data, real impact.
Here’s how three Amper customers found hidden capacity—without hiring, buying new equipment, or adding shifts.
When GM Nick Sainati started at Belden Universal, he had no visibility into his machines’ performance.
After implementing Amper, the data revealed three major downtime culprits. The team then planned and prioritized continuous improvement projects that ended up yielding $60K in annual savings—and enough recovered capacity to delay two new machine purchases.
Because they regained so much wasted capacity, Belden was also able to justify the delay of two machine purchases, saving $50K in annual interest expenses alone.
“We use Amper to plan our capacity. The biggest question for any manufacturer is, ‘Do you have enough capacity for the work you have?’”
— Nick Sainati, GM, Belden Universal
The team at Destaco-Mt. Joliet wanted to introduce more capacity without spending more money. They aimed to test lights-out production to cut labor costs and increase overall throughput, but couldn’t track overnight performance.
Amper allowed the team to automatically track the utilization data without the added labor or paperwork. So they tested lights-out production with Amper over eight weeks.
The results? Their pallet pool machines could maintain solid utilization numbers—giving them an extra four hours of capacity each day.
GPP wanted to ensure every operator was spending time on value-added work: running machines or doing setups. Plant Manager Michael Abbott wanted to see two hours of machine uptime or one hour of setup per hour of paid labor.
With Amper, the team tracked labor more effectively, made targeted changes, and saw huge gains:
In short, GPP was able to generate more sales while reducing costs, leading to an improved profit margin.
“When we started this initiative with Amper, about 80% of what we were paying we were turning into production. We now average over 100% every single week of paid production.”
— Michael Abbot, Plant Manager, GPP
If you’re turning down work, falling behind on orders, or thinking about new hires or machines—it’s time to pause.
You might already have the capacity. You just need the visibility.
Amper helps you uncover what’s holding your plant back, so you can get more done without doing more.
Book a demo to see how you can do more with less.
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