Doing more with less, part 1: Get total machine visibility

Do you have a goal to increase efficiency, improve delivery times, or boost margins without increasing headcount or buying new equipment? It all starts with one critical step: Getting real-time and plant-wide visibility into your machines.

Not just a rough sense of how things are running or the downtime your team remembers to write down. You need complete and objective visibility into how your equipment is performing—shift by shift, job by job.

Why it matters

When you don’t have accurate data on what your machines are doing throughout the day, it’s almost impossible to make meaningful improvements.

Machine visibility gives you the answers to questions like:

• How much of our day is spent in unplanned downtime?
• Which machines are underperforming—and why?
• Are we getting consistent output across shifts?
• Where should we focus our next improvement effort?

With real-time machine monitoring, you can stop relying on guesswork and start making decisions based on facts.

What happens if you skip this step?

Here’s the reality:
You can’t improve what you can’t see.

Teams that skip this step often find themselves stuck in the same cycle:

• Missed deadlines
• Constant firefighting
• New equipment purchases that don’t solve the underlying issue

And because they’re operating without full visibility, they’re often spending time and money fixing the wrong problems. We’ve seen manufacturers assume they needed more machines to meet demand—when in reality, they were only using 60% of their current capacity due to untracked downtime.

That’s hours of production lost every week.
That’s money left on the table.
That’s avoidable cost—and preventable frustration.

Why only connecting a few machines isn't enough

Many manufacturers think that connecting just a few machines (e.g. only the most “critical” ones) is good enough. The "good enough" mentality isn't saving you anything—not time, money, or labor—it's only holding you back from the margins you could be realizing.

The issue with partial visibility is that you might see problems on one machine but miss bigger issues elsewhere. Or worse—you may assume those connected machines are the problem, when the root cause is actually upstream or downstream.

This kind of incomplete data creates blind spots that lead to:

• Misdiagnosed issues
• Wasted time chasing the wrong problems
• Missed opportunities for improvement

To get a true picture of what’s happening, you need to connect every single machine. That’s the only way to confidently compare performance, identify bottlenecks, and make smart decisions that affect the whole operation. Without that, you're not just operating with partial visibility. You’re operating with misleading visibility—and that can be even more dangerous.

What it looks like in real life

When Nick Sainati, GM at Belden Universal, took over his family's business, he was shocked that he didn't have visibility into his half-million-dollar machines' performance.

Here's what happened when the team at Belden implemented Amper:

"When we saw the data for the first time, we had this immediate 'wow' moment." — Nick Sainati, GM, Belden Universal

Within two weeks, they had full, real-time visibility into machine status and utilization. Once they could see what was actually happening on the floor, the impact was immediate.

• They uncovered three major downtime culprits (setup time, inspection delays, and deburring) and launched targeted CI projects.
• Those projects led to $60,000 in annual savings through regained uptime and labor efficiency.
• By regaining so much capacity, they postponed the purchase of two new machines, delaying a $1M capital expense and saving $50,000 in annual interest costs alone.

Altogether, Belden realized $110,000 in annual savings—all by starting with something simple but powerful: complete visibility.

How to get started

You don’t need a massive system overhaul to get started. In fact, the most effective solutions are often the simplest.

1. Start with non-invasive monitoring.
   Look for a system that can connect to any machine—regardless of age, brand, or control system—without needing complex integrations or extensive downtime for implementation.
2. Capture the right data.
   Focus on core metrics like runtime, downtime, and utilization. These give you a clear, objective view of what’s happening across shifts, machines, and jobs.
3. Make the data accessible.
   Real-time dashboards, shift scoreboards, and operator interfaces help your whole team stay aligned and act faster when issues arise.
4. Use the data to drive decisions.
   Once you have visibility, use it to identify bottlenecks, launch targeted CI projects, and measure results. Visibility isn’t the goal—it’s the tool that helps you improve.