ROI calculator
Build your ROI case from your own numbers, not our brochure.
Every vendor has an ROI page and almost none of them can be checked. The percentages are real for somebody, somewhere, in an industry that may not be yours. This page works the other way round: we supply the arithmetic and the questions your board is going to ask, and you supply every figure that goes into it.
There is no improvement percentage anywhere on this page. We have not seen your floor, so we do not know what you can get. What we can tell you is what a single percentage point is worth once you have it — and then the ambition is yours to set, and yours to defend.
Your figures
Six numbers you already know, and one you choose.
The defaults below are placeholders for a small moulding or machining shop. They are not a claim about your business and they are not benchmarks — overwrite every one of them. The results update as you type and nothing is sent anywhere.
What it costs you now
What one point is worth
Per point, deliberately. We are not going to tell you that a monitoring system removes a third of your downtime. Decide what a year of attention is worth on your floor, multiply, and put your name on that number rather than ours.
Against the spend you typed in
Every number in this box came from the boxes on the left. None of it came from us: no benchmark, no assumed improvement, no industry average quietly doing the heavy lifting. It is arithmetic, and arithmetic only says what a point is worth if you get it. It does not say you will get it.
Two things the model deliberately does not do. It does not compound — cutting downtime raises the hours available to scrap, and we leave that alone rather than quietly inflating the result. And it counts only the two lines that are easiest to defend in a meeting; energy waste, expediting, overtime and the hours spent collecting numbers are all real and all missing here, which means the figure above is a floor rather than a forecast.
What the product records
What SmartFactory records behind the case.
The calculator counts two lines, downtime and scrap. Energy and the hours spent collecting figures are real too. Here is what SmartFactory records for downtime, quality and energy, and the manual collection it takes off your team.
Unplanned downtime
SmartFactory opens the downtime event itself, timestamped from when the machine actually stopped, and the operator classifies it in two taps. The figure worth watching alongside it is unclassified downtime, because that is the share of your Pareto that is currently guesswork.
How downtime is captured →The cost of quality
Every inspection result and scrap event lands against a job, a part, an operator and a shift, so right-first-time stops being a monthly average and becomes something you can point at.
Quality, RFT and SPC →Idle energy
Clamp-on meters cost little and fit without downtime, idle consumption is detected against each machine’s own learned baseline, and every event is priced at the tariff that applied at the time.
Energy and cost per part →Manual data collection
Count the hours your team spends collecting and reconciling figures, at loaded cost. When capture comes off the machine, that work stops rather than moves.
What is captured automatically →What the board will ask
The four questions, and the answers we would give in the room.
What does it cost?
SmartFactory is priced on use — pence per stage of production, per part — so a quiet month costs less than a busy one and starting on one cell costs about what one cell is worth. There are no seat licences, energy monitoring is in the price, and the rate card sits inside the product where you can read it whenever you like. Put your own figure in the calculator above and see what it has to earn. The pricing page has the model in full.
What if it doesn’t work for us?
Then you will find out cheaply and early. The trial runs on a fully simulated factory, usually the same day you ask, so you can judge the product before a meter is fitted. After that, pilot on a handful of machines rather than the whole floor. There is no long contract to unwind, because the spend follows use — stop using it and it stops costing. Start a trial, or read how to run a pilot that proves something.
Is there funding?
Possibly, through Made Smarter: the funding card below has the figures.
How long until we see numbers?
A pilot machine reports its state from the first cycle it runs, and an OEE figure with real availability, performance and quality behind it needs only enough production to be worth reading — days rather than months. Be careful how you phrase that to a board: what happens in days is that the system starts showing you the truth. How long it then takes your business to act on it is a question about your business, and we would be making it up if we answered it for you.
Funding
Made Smarter can fund up to half of it.
Eligible manufacturers in nine English regions can access match-funded grants of up to £20,000 (around 50%) for digital adoption projects — production monitoring included. Made Smarter is impartial and UK government-backed, and your regional programme decides which projects it funds, so start there.
Bring your own numbers and we’ll argue with them.
Send us what you put in the calculator. An engineer will tell you which lines we think are optimistic, which machines are worth piloting first, and what it would realistically cost to find out — before anybody writes a business case.