For owners with more than one unit
You don't run five factories. You run whichever one you're standing in.
The same sensor on every machine at every site, and one cost model behind all of them — so Unit 1 and Unit 3 are finally the same number, measured the same way. And an agent that reads every unit continuously and brings you the three things that need you today.
Each site carries its own tariff, its own wage rates and its own overheads. Nothing is averaged across the group.
What it lets you do
Four things that only start working once every site is measured the same way.
None of these is a report. Each one is a decision you can take this week and could not take at all when each unit kept its own register in its own hand.
Put your units in order, honestly
Cost per kilo, downtime by reason, output per machine-hour — the same instrument at every site. A difference between units becomes a real difference in the units, and it arrives with its reason attached.
Send the order to the right unit
Enter the product and the quantity and get the made cost at each site, on that site's machines, tariff, wage rates and overheads — before you quote, not after. Or route it by the date the machines can actually hold.
A profit and loss per unit, monthly
Each site's own rent, own tariff, own salaries and own interest landing on it. You find out which unit earns and which one you have been funding, in month one rather than year three.
One agent reading all of them
Jarvis reads every unit's floor and books continuously and pushes you the handful that need a decision today. No login per site, and no five screens to go round.
All four rest on the same thing: one non-invasive sensor on every machine at every site, and the same four-part cost build behind all of them. See how it works or what it costs per site.
Your week, on paper
Two days a week in a car, to find out what already happened.
You drive because there is no other way to find out. By the time you arrive, the thing you came about is four days old, and the version you get is the version somebody chose to tell you.
At three units that is roughly eight days a month in a car. At five it stops working at any price — five sites is twenty-five site-days a month, and there are not twenty-five of you.
Blitz does not make the driving faster. It removes the reason for it. You go to a unit to do something you have already decided, and the visit takes an hour instead of a day.
Which is why the group stops growing at the number of sites you can personally reach — not at the number you can afford.
Like for like
Two units cannot be compared until they are measured by the same instrument.
Unit 1 counts a stoppage when the machine stops. Unit 3 counts it when the supervisor remembers. So "Unit 3 is expensive" is not a finding, it is an argument — and it has been running for two years.
Put the same sensor on every machine at both sites, with the same four-part cost build behind it — material, energy, labour, overhead — and the sentence changes into a number, with the reason already attached to it.
Three components, and they add to the gap exactly: 14 cents plus 8 cents less 2 cents is 20 cents.
Now look at what that does to the next question.
The 14 cents is the power tariff in that town. You are not going to fix it — so stop trying, and stop running the energy-heavy product there.
The 8 cents is machines standing, and that one is yours. On Unit 3's 14,000 kg a month it is $1,120 a month, $13,440 a year, and you can see which machine and which shift it comes out of.
And the 2 cents says Unit 3 actually buys material better than Unit 1 — which you did not know either, and which is worth copying the other way.
The whole 20 cents on Unit 3's own volume is $2,800 a month. It has been there all along.
What you could not do was see it — or, more expensive, you fixed the wrong part of it. Two years of arguing about the men, when most of it was the electricity board.
Routing
Send the order to the unit that makes it cheapest — before you quote it, not after.
Enter the product and the quantity and Blitz prices it at each unit: that unit's machines, that unit's tariff, that unit's wage rates, that unit's overheads. Including a product you have never made before.
Today the order goes where there is room, or to the supervisor you trust most. Room is a feeling. Nobody can tell you what the same job would have cost at the other site, so nobody asks.
A 10,000 kg order placed at Unit 1 instead of Unit 3 is $2,000 you keep on that one order.
One order like it a month is $24,000 a year — with no new customer, no new machine and no new shift. The same work, made where it is cheaper to make.
Route to the unit that can finish it first
When the customer is buying a date instead of a price, you can see free machine-hours at every site for the next three weeks and answer honestly: Unit 2 clears this by the 14th, Unit 1 not before the 22nd. The machines behind that date are booked, not hoped for — and you can charge for the fast lane, because you know which unit actually is the fast lane.
Move the volume that has never moved
A customer's 3,000 kg a month has gone to Unit 1 for six years. Unit 1 is on overtime and Unit 3 has four machines standing. Move a third of it. The 750 machine-hours that picks up at Unit 3 are worth $1,500 a month, $18,000 a year of contribution that idle machines were earning nothing — and the overtime it replaces at Unit 1 costs you more than that again. Both were coming out of the same pocket.
The quoting works the same way at one unit or five — see how a job you have never made gets priced.
Copy the practice
Find out why the good unit is good — then move it to the others.
"Unit 1 is just better run" is an opinion, and an opinion cannot be installed at Unit 3. When downtime is coded the same way at every site, the opinion turns into one line.
Changeover takes 95 minutes at Unit 3 and 40 at Unit 1 — same machine, same product, same shift length. Six changeovers a day is 5.5 machine-hours a day sitting in the difference: about $11 a day, $3,300 a year at that one unit, for a habit another one of your own units already has.
It costs a day of your time to go and watch it, not a purchase order. And once it is written down, it stays when the man who invented it leaves on Monday.
How downtime gets codedNot a mystery about the men. One habit, at one unit, that another unit of yours already solved.
Buying
Buy as one buyer, against what the group actually consumed.
Blitz shows real consumption per site, pulled from what the machines actually ran rather than from what three men estimated, so you place one order for the group.
Three units, three purchase decisions, three rates — and you find out the rates were different when you happen to see two bills side by side.
$24,000 a year, for a phone call you were making anyway
The group buys about $1.2 million of material a year across the three sites. Two per cent off for buying as one buyer instead of three is $24,000 — and the only thing that changed is that somebody could finally see the three of them at once.
Unit 2 has been overpaying for eleven months
12 cents a kilo more than Unit 1 for the identical grade. On Unit 2's 10,000 kg a month that is $1,200 a month, $14,400 a year — and nobody was hiding it. Nobody could see it.
And stop buying what you already own.
Unit 3 is sitting on 8 tonnes of the grade Unit 1 is about to buy at spot rate this week. Nobody at Unit 1 knows, because nobody at Unit 1 can see Unit 3's godown. Move it instead — about $20,000 of working capital that does not get spent twice, and that is one grade at one site.
Material intake is photographed and weighed at the gate, and stock is checked calculated-against-counted at every invoice, so a transfer between units is a checked event and not a hole in two registers.
What happens at the gateUnit profit and loss
Which unit actually makes money, once its own overheads land on it.
Blitz gives each unit its own profit and loss every month, with its own rent, its own tariff, its own salaries and its own interest landing on it. The floor comes from the sensors, the book side is read in from Tally, and for once both are talking about the same money.
Your accountant nets the group together, once a year. That is the one view guaranteed to hide the thing you most need to see.
Every year, quietly, and you have been calling it a good year.
A group showing $150,000 of profit is very rarely three units making $50,000 each.
It is far more often $170,000 at one and minus $40,000 at another. Until each site's own overheads land on it, the unit that earns hides the unit that bleeds, and you genuinely do not know which is which.
The other half of the same mistake.
The unit with the biggest sales is assumed to be the best unit. $1,100,000 of sales at 4% is $44,000. $600,000 at 11% is $66,000.
The quiet one is the better business — and on the books you have today, nobody in the room can prove it. Which is exactly the argument you are about to have about where the next machines go.
Grow and close
Where the next machines go, and which unit to close.
An hour of machine time earns $2.80 of contribution at Unit 1 and $2.00 at Unit 3. Twelve new machines at 6,000 hours a year, placed at Unit 1 instead of Unit 3, is about $57,600 a year of contribution difference on exactly the same capital spend.
The machines cost the same either way. The only thing you are choosing is which floor they stand on, and until now that was chosen by which supervisor asked loudest or which site is nearest home.
It is also how the hardest decision finally gets made. Closing a unit is a family argument today, because nobody can say what it actually contributes. On a number you can defend, it stops being an argument and becomes a decision.
80 cents an hour, across 72,000 hours. That is the whole decision, and it is one line.
Delegation
Hand a unit to a manager. Keep the truth.
Give a manager his own login, his own screens and the authority to run his unit. You see exactly what he sees, without asking him for it, because none of it is typed in by the man being measured.
Delegating today means trusting, and the only way to check trust is to drive there and stand in it. So you never really delegate — you take your eyes off it for a week at a time.
Recorded at the machine
Production is stored as it happens, by the sensor, at the moment it arrives. Nobody at the unit writes the number that judges the unit.
Photographed at the gate
Weighed and photographed as it comes in, at every site. Buying can be delegated and still checked, which is the only way it is ever really delegated.
Calculated against counted
At every invoice, what the recipe says was used is set beside what is physically there. A difference is a question that gets asked on the day, at the site it belongs to.
That is the whole difference between owning two units and owning five. One manager per floor — and you are not the manager of all of them. Roles decide who sees which unit, and nobody can edit what the sensor recorded at any of them.
And the conversation changes.
You stop asking how the week went and being told it went fine. You both look at the same line: Tuesday's downtime was four hours, coded, by machine and by shift. The argument about whether it happened is over; only why is left.
And the supervisor who genuinely runs a tight unit stops being invisible — which is usually the one you were about to lose for $200 a month more somewhere else.
Away
Be away for two weeks and still know.
Ill, travelling, abroad, at a wedding. Away should not mean blind, and coming back should not mean a month of surprises.
If a customer slides from 45 days to 90 on a $35,000 balance, that is $35,000 of your own money funding somebody else for six extra weeks — and you hear about it on the day it drifts, wherever you are, not at the next review.
Jarvis, across units
One man can watch one factory. Nobody can watch five.
This is the part that decides whether a fourth unit makes you bigger or breaks you. Three units at twenty machines is sixty machines. Nobody reads sixty machines. You read three lines.
Nobody opened anything. Nobody asked it a question.
Jarvis reads every unit's floor and books continuously and pushes you only what needs a decision. Anything else you want — floor or books, any unit, last night or last March — you put in one box, in a sentence: why was Unit 3 slower than Unit 1 last month?
No login per site. No five screens to go round. Every point on this page is worth something at two units and three times as much at five — but only if somebody reads all five every day, and that was never going to be you.
Which is why the sixth unit becomes a question about capital instead of a question about your calendar.
What Jarvis watchesThe next unit
Open the next unit on arithmetic instead of hope.
You already know, measured, what a machine-hour costs you, what power costs per kilo, what labour costs per kilo and what the recipe consumes. The new unit's plan is last quarter's real figures with the new town's tariff and rent dropped in.
So you find out whether nine cents a kilo of extra tariff kills the margin before the lease is signed, not after the machines are bolted down — on the 12,000 kg a month you are planning, that is $1,080 a month, about $13,000 a year, and it either fits or it does not.
And because the same sensor goes on from day one, month one of the new unit is directly comparable to every other unit you own.
Acquisition
Buy a struggling factory and know inside thirty days whether it is any good.
Sensors clip onto its machines in a day — plug point and WiFi, nothing rewired, nothing shut down. Thirty days later you have its real utilisation, its real downtime with reasons, and its real cost per kilo, on the same yardstick as your own units. Diligence on your own measurements instead of the seller's books.
The reason you have not bought one is not money. It is that you could not read what you were buying, and could not run it once you had. Both of those just changed.
You negotiate with the number instead of hoping for it
The machines run 41% of the shift. The same machines earn $2.80 an hour at your best unit and $2.00 here — across twenty machines and 6,000 hours that gap is $96,000 a year of upside, and now it is on the table in front of the seller rather than in your head.
You walk away for the cost of one month
Thirty days of measurement says the machines are simply worn, not badly run. That is a $750,000 mistake you do not make, and you found it out before the money moved rather than two years after.
The bank and the buyer
Numbers a stranger can check.
Every unit's output, downtime, cost, margin by product and by customer, receivables ageing and material tied up come from the same measured source, month after month, tied to the invoices you actually issued.
And a sensor record cannot be tidied up afterwards: a correction is a new row beside the original, never an overwrite. That is what makes a stranger's week of checking end in agreement rather than in four months of arguing about whether the figures are real.
Today you take registers, a Tally file and your word for it. A bank has seen registers before, so it lends against collateral and a discount. A buyer discounts harder.
And often the rate is not the point — getting the limit at all is. Anyone who has sold a factory can tell you what the second line cost him.
One day
And one day, a group that can be divided without a fight.
Between sons, between partners, at a buy-out. Each unit has its own record of what it earns and what it ties up, going back years, written down before anybody had a reason to argue about it. And each person can be given his own unit — and only his own unit — to run and to see.
Mechanics
What it takes to add a unit.
A new unit is measuring within the week and comparable to the others from its first full month. Here is the whole of it, in front of you rather than discovered in week three.
A sensor per machine
Plug point and WiFi. Nothing rewired, no machine stopped, and nothing to ask the machine's maker for.
Settings per site
Your shifts, your units of measure, your cost headings and your recipes, set for that site — because Unit 3's tariff and Unit 1's tariff are not the same thing and software should not pretend they are.
One login, roles inside it
Every unit sits under the same login, and roles decide who sees which. The group view is not a separate thing you switch to.
Comparable from month one
Same instrument, same cost build. There is nothing to reconcile between sites, because nothing was written by hand at either of them.
More on the practical side: supported machines · how it works · pricing.
The ledger
What it adds up to, on three units.
The same worked example this page has been carrying: three units, 40,000 kg a month between them, 360,000 machine-hours a year. Check the arithmetic — every line is one of the sections above.
| Where it comes from | A year |
|---|---|
| Machine hours you are losing that nobody mentions — 2% of 360,000 hours at $2.40 | $17,280 |
| One order a month sent to the unit that makes it cheaper — 10,000 kg at 20 cents | $24,000 |
| Buying as one buyer instead of three — 2% of $1.2 million of material | $24,000 |
| The rate one unit has quietly been overpaying — 12 cents a kilo at Unit 2 | $14,400 |
| The same three factories, measured | About $80,000 |
The first line is where the changeover habit and the standing machines already live — do not add them again, and we have not. Not one of these is a new customer, a new machine or a new shift. And none of them is the unit profit and loss, the acquisition or the bank, which are decisions rather than lines in a ledger.
Come and see two of your own units next to each other.
Bring the two you argue about. We will put sensors on one line at each, and you can watch the same number arrive from both. If they turn out to be identical, you have lost a week and learned something worth knowing.