What is predictive maintenance worth at a plant like yours? You can now look it up.
The calculator could already tell you what a point of OEE is worth. As of this weekend it answers the question most people actually arrive with: what is this use case worth at a plant like mine?
What is a use case worth?
Open the calculator and choose By use case. Pick any of the 529 use cases in the library, set your industry and annual revenue, and say whether the plant could sell more if it made more. You get the use case's annual EBITDA impact at an industry-typical plant of that size, the lines of the P&L the money lands on, and the KPIs it moves.
Here is one worth trying. Predictive and condition-based maintenance at a $250 million automotive plant comes out at about $1.5 million a year if the plant is limited by demand, and about $3.5 million if it is sold out. The difference is the point: in a sold-out plant, the hours you stop losing to breakdowns become product you can ship, so the same work is worth more than twice as much. The largest single line is maintenance spares, at about $547 thousand. And Mean Time Between Failures goes from an industry-typical 800 hours to about 860.
Most KPIs in that list link back to the original calculator, so you can go from "this use case moves MTBF by 7.5%" to "here is what a 1% move in MTBF is worth" in one click.
Two things to keep in mind when reading the numbers. Each one is that use case on its own, at a plant of typical maturity. Use cases overlap, so their figures do not add up: run predictive maintenance and a spare-parts program together, and part of what each one saves is the same money. The full analysis values a set of use cases together, against your own baseline and your team's survey answers, which is where a plan should come from. The calculator is where a conversation should start.
The use-case view is free with an account. The KPI view stays open to everyone.
Your whole team can see the assessment
Until this week, the maturity dashboard was for company admins only. That meant the people who took the assessment could not see what it found.
Now every member of the company can, unless the company decides otherwise. There is a new Assessment results setting under Company settings, and it is on by default. Members see exactly what admins see: aggregated results, with any group smaller than your privacy floor still hidden, so no individual's answers are ever shown. Generating lists, priorities and the executive summary stays with admins.
We think this is the right default. Someone who gave an hour to an assessment has a fair claim to the result, and a team that can see where coverage is thin is far more likely to fill it in.
A roadmap that knows what you are already doing
A plant halfway through an improvement program does not have a blank calendar, and the roadmap now knows it.
Work already underway uses capacity. Priorities now charges each year with the effort your committed programs still need before it schedules anything new, and shows how much of each year is already spoken for. On our ExampleCo demo, the Topeka and Dayton plants are carrying enough committed work to fill their first year twice over, so their new work starts in year two and year three. That is a more honest roadmap, and a useful prompt to set your real capacity rather than relying on the default.
Assumptions show what is in flight. If a live program is rolling out a solution, its row now says so, for example "In flight: 24% delivered, 3 yrs to go", instead of inviting you to mark it as already in place.
Corporate roadmaps see their plants. A corporate or division roadmap now lists what its plants already have underway, so when it recommends a system, you can see whether a plant is already in the middle of installing it. These are shown, not counted, because a program at one plant does not cover the whole company.
From roadmap to improvement program, without retyping. Roadmap steps now become initiatives directly, each carrying exactly the solutions its step bought, grouped however you like: one per step, one per year, or by hand. A new improvement program picks up each initiative's start year from the roadmap. And Priorities and the investment plan now share one screen, so the features you found in one are now in both.
Corrections
The KPI calculator now prices an improvement the way a plant would make it. The model could reach a better number by moving the base a KPI is measured against: it "improved" Worker Fatigue Rate by working more shifts and DSO by selling more on credit. Those inputs are now held still. At $1 billion in revenue, a 1% improvement in Worker Fatigue Rate is now worth $145 thousand rather than $43 thousand, and DSO $1.77 million rather than $159 thousand. Takt Time and the backlog measures no longer carry a price, because they describe demand rather than performance. Three KPIs that had dropped out, including Inventory Accuracy and Asset Utilization, are back.
Six finance use cases were overvalued, and the new calculator is how we found them. Use cases such as Cost Behavior Understanding and Budgeting Process Quality were being credited with material and labor savings for lowering the production budget. A budget is a plan, not spending, so lowering it is not a saving. Real savings from better cost management still count, through actual production cost. At a $250 million plant, Cost Behavior Understanding goes from $10.0 million a year to $2.4 million, and the six together from $37.0 million to $13.4 million. Saved roadmaps and plans pick up the change when you regenerate them.
Where to start
Try the calculator on the use case you have been asked about most recently, at your own revenue, and switch between demand-limited and sold out. If the answer surprises you, that is usually the start of a useful conversation.
If you run an assessment program, look at the new setting under Company settings, and let the people who took part see what they built.
ExampleCo is a fictional manufacturer we built to demonstrate the method. Its financial model and every calculation shown are real; the company, its people and their answers are not.