Overtime in manufacturing is largely a visibility problem. The delay that requires three hours of overtime at the end of the shift was usually visible — as a recoverable situation — four hours earlier. The problem is that nobody saw it.
A 20-minute delay at 9 AM compounds differently than a 20-minute delay at 1 PM. Early in the shift, a supervisor who sees a red session has options: move a resource, approve additional support, adjust the priority queue, simplify a step. The recovery cost is low.
Four hours later, the same delay has compounded into an hour and a half. Recovery requires either missing the ship date or authorizing overtime. The cost has multiplied not because the underlying problem got worse, but because the intervention window closed.
A live takt timer on every operator's screen, visible to the supervisor in real time, creates intervention windows that didn't exist before. The supervisor sees a red row on the dashboard at 9:15 AM — not at 2:30 PM.
At 9:15, the recovery options are numerous and cheap. The supervisor can act. At 2:30, the options are expensive and few. The presence of a live signal converts a scheduling problem into a management decision made at the right time.
The calculation is specific to each facility, but the structure is consistent: take the average cost of an overtime hour, multiply by the average hours of overtime per missed-ship event, multiply by the frequency of such events. Even reducing that frequency by 20-30% through earlier intervention typically covers the cost of a production floor visibility system within the first quarter of deployment.
30 minutes. Live screen share. We'll configure it against your areas, your processes, your standard hours.