TMI / MANUFACTURING
TMI works inside established manufacturing companies to connect the floor, the office, the data, and the decisions around the way production actually happens.
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WHY THIS IS EXPENSIVE
Walk a production floor and ask a supervisor what is behind. They will tell you accurately, immediately, from memory. Ask the same question in the office and the answer takes a day, three phone calls and a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every Monday morning.
That delay is the whole problem. Every decision made in the office — what to promise, what to expedite, whether to run overtime, what to charge — is made against a picture of the floor that is somewhere between a shift and a week old.
A promise date set from Friday's numbers on a Wednesday is a guess. The cost shows up as expedites, overtime nobody planned, and a customer told something that was true when it was said and wrong by the time it mattered.
Most established plants run on the judgment of a handful of long-serving supervisors rather than on written standard work. It works, until a shift changes hands, a line is added, or the person who held the sequence in their head retires.
Labour is in payroll, materials are in purchasing, scrap is on a clipboard, and downtime is nowhere. The true cost of a run can usually be assembled, which is not the same as being known, and pricing decisions are made long before anyone assembles it.
Almost none of this calls for new production equipment. It calls for the floor and the office to be looking at the same thing at the same time.
WHERE COMPANIES GET HELD BACK
What we find in established plants, almost regardless of what they make or how big they are.
WHAT WE LEARN ON SITE
WHAT TMI CAN BUILD
Standard work is easier to capture while production is running than from documents afterwards. An operator inside the plant →
THE $5,000 AUDIT, READ THROUGH THIS TRADE
The audit is the same instrument in every company: ten areas, ten points each, scored against a written rubric. What changes is what we go looking for. In a manufacturing company it looks like this.
What the audit is, and what you get → Put a number on two of these yourself first →
THE FIRST BUILD
A live view of what is running, what is queued, what is late and what is blocked, built from the systems and records the plant already has rather than from a new layer of data entry.
The hard part is never the screen. It is deciding what counts as started, what counts as finished, and who is accountable for the record being right — which is a management conversation TMI runs before anything is built.
Sequences, changeovers, tolerances and the workarounds that keep the line moving, documented with the supervisors who hold them rather than written at them by someone from outside.
This is what makes a second shift or a second site possible. It is also what a retirement takes with it if nobody does the work, and it is the single most common thing an established plant has never written down.
Labour, materials, scrap and downtime assembled against the run that produced them, so pricing and capacity decisions are made on this quarter rather than on the last one.
Most plants discover at least one product line that has been subsidised by another for years. That finding alone has repeatedly changed what a company chooses to quote, long before any software is built.
THE TEST
Without walking the floor, in under a minute:
Most plants can answer two or three without asking someone. The rest is the audit.
HOW WE START
Production status, standard work and the real cost of a run usually live in supervisors, clipboards and a spreadsheet rebuilt every Monday. We start by finding out where, and what it is costing to keep it there.
Submit your info and book a call ↗COMMON QUESTIONS
No. Lean work improves how the production process runs. TMI works on the information around it — what the office knows, when it knows it, and what it can do with it. The two sit well together, and a plant with a working lean programme usually gets more out of this, not less.
Usually not, and we will argue against it unless the audit says otherwise. Most plants have an ERP holding reasonable data behind an interface the floor refuses to use. Connecting it and building focused tools on top is faster, cheaper and far less disruptive than a replacement.
That is the first thing we design against. Any system that asks operators for information they do not benefit from gets abandoned within a month, and should. Where new capture is genuinely needed we build it into something the operator was already doing.
It is the right time, not too early. Automating a process nobody has written down industrialises the confusion. Standard work and visibility are what make a later automation decision cheap instead of expensive.
Yes. We walk the floor, follow runs across shifts, sit with supervisors and map the handovers before anything is designed. A plant cannot be understood from its documentation.
It is a constraint, not a blocker, and paper is often more honest than an unused system. Digitising records is part of the Data Foundation stage, and the audit will say whether it needs doing first or can wait behind something more valuable.
Yes, and downtime is frequently where the clearest finding is. Maintenance usually has the best records in the building and the least influence on what gets promised to customers.
A day on site, conversations with the people who actually run the work, and access to records. Production does not stop. The disruptive part is afterwards, when the roadmap says something the plant has been working around for years is the constraint.
The audit is $5,000, in person or by phone, and you leave with the Intelligent Company Roadmap, yours outright whatever you do next. The call you book from this page is the free Fit Call before it.
SHOW US THE PLANT