LiveFactory is an innovative suite of tools designed to empower your team to

improve machine productivity,

use your labour more efficiently,

and improve service levels.

Why use it?

Empower your staff to visualize bottlenecks, monitor production and react proactively, all of which directly benefit your bottom line.

 Improve Service Levels by

  • Creating transparency through visual management

  • Addressing bottlenecks

  • Achieving your production plan

 Improve Labour Productivity by

  • Improving labour utilization

  • Measuring Units/Labour hr

  • Accounting for non-productive labour hours

 Improve Machine Productivity by

  • Improving start-up performance

  • Reducing line stoppages

  • Understanding capacity constraints

We’ve distilled years of lean manufacturing experience into an easy-to-use product to accelerate your lean manufacturing journey. 

Our Easy-to-Use Product

Visualize and remove bottlenecks with SkyView

You need product on the shelf and a high service level. Often the bottleneck is before production even starts. LiveFactory’s SkyView Module is the visual management tool you’ve been waiting for.

  • Track each stage of the job from BOM fulfillment to quality release

  • See bottlenecks clearly with visual management

  • Act with transparency using our built-in electronic Kanbans

  • Insights provide reporting on on-time performance, job cycle times and late job paretos

Monitor Production Line Performance

One of your highest variable costs are your wage costs. When your line stands due to a stoppage, your operators stand and your conversion costs are high. LiveFactory has a cloud-based Production Monitor that improves productivity by helping your team chase down production targets, see real-time insights and focus their improvement efforts.

  • Reliable, live stats on each production line put your supervisors in control

  • OEE analysis allows for pinpoint problem definition leading to better efficiencies

  • Stoppage analysis leads to increased availability

  • Team performance stats allow for better labour management and utilizations

React Proactively with Electronic Kanbans

You need an easy way to communicate and remove critical Supply Chain and Production bottlenecks. Electronic Kanbans are integrated throughout LiveFactory to communicate tasks between teams that are traceable and actionable.

  • Easy to configure and intuitive to use

  • Kanbans are traceable and measurable creating clear accountability

  • Kanbans can be linked to Jobs providing live status updates that keeps everyone informed on the actions related to critical bottlenecks

  • Kanbans can be linked to email notifications for information or escalation

  • Pre-configured templates are customized to your operation to ensure that data is correctly entered and follows your companies SOPs

  • Kanban insights provide “bottleneck” reporting that can be used to measure and improve supply chain performance

  • Typical uses are for expediting missing BOM items, replenishing raw materials, logging quality issues and handling all other exceptions.

Benefits

We built the tools we needed to improve your operation

  • Designed by a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt engineer

  • Robust system designed and road tested in South Africa

  • Embeds lean manufacturing principles and tools to encourage productive behaviours to create a responsive manufacturing environment

  • Provides automatic focused insights to accelerate your lean improvement journey

Simple setup and launch leads to immediate impact

  • Cloud-based setup means only mains power and a LAN cable and a single IR sensor are

    required for monitoring production lines

  • Clever UX design allows intuitive operation and easy training and onboarding

  • Option to integrate with your ERP system down the line

“We created LiveFactory from the ground up as an easy but powerful production monitoring solution.  It’s not that there aren’t systems for this already, however we used our consulting experience to integrate lean principles directly into the product. By design, we promote efficient behaviour.”
— Salim Essack, Co-Founder

Case Study

  • A manufacturer of over-the-counter medicines deployed LiveFactory in order to kick-start a lean manufacturing programme.

  • In order to minimise impact on the production team the deployment and training was staggered over a month, as the year end shut-down was approaching.

  • Immediate benefits included greater visibility of planned and actual volumes, leading to greater accountability among operators and more focused production meetings.  Line Supervisors now have to account for their stoppages creating a culture of accountability and Maintenance has to prioritize fixes based on actual quantifiable production pain points.

  • Better understanding of the production environment and its constraints is leading to a more motivated and better aligned management team.

  • LiveFactory provided a reliable, complete data-set that provided a clear business-case to reconfigure a batch processing line to a single piece workflow process. After a few production runs on the new process, LiveFactory established the new achievable demonstrated capacity. As a result the planners were able to significantly increase sustainable production output levels.

  • Over a two month period LiveFactory was deployed, staff trained, and analysis generated that has improved operator accountability, supported a concrete step change in demonstrated capacity on one line, and built the team’s confidence to drive further improvements.  Decisions are now backed up by data that is visible to everyone.

— Peter Kreft, CEO, CoMED Health —

LiveFactory software fills the gap when you don’t have the staff maturity or skills.

— Yakeel Baruth, Industrial Engineer, Silveray Stationery Company (Bidvest Group) —

Over the past 3 years,  LiveFactory has changed the way we look at our operational efficiency with its performance first philosopy . The real-time visibility into production and supply chain data has enabled our team to respond quickly to inefficiencies and drive continuous improvement. The LiveFactory/ Skyview platform has become an integral tool in how we carry out our daily operation with the Kanban system being used extensively beyond traditional material flow applications.

What stands out most is the incredible support from Salim and the team, who are always available to assist with troubleshooting or general queries whilst consistently going above and beyond to tailor the platform to the evolving needs of a modern manufacturing plant – this dedication makes it feel as if the LF team is an extension of our organization.

— Sharon Sithole, Production Supervisor, CoMED Health — 

LiveFactory has greatly improved communication amongst departments and improved relationships in the company.

Pricing

LiveFactory has a fundamentally different business model to other monitoring software

  • Pricing is per production line, with no limit on the number of users

  • Being cloud based, hardware and installations costs are substantially lower than competing platforms

  • Simple, clear pricing with a simple monthly service fee

FAQ

Will it work for my factory?

Yes.  LiveFactory will work for any production environment where an IR sensor can be mounted to count items as they pass by.

Who owns the data?

You own your data and it is downloadable at any point as a CSV file.

Is it secure?

Yes. We follow industry best practice to protect your data.

Am I locked in?

No. We are confident in the quality our product and service, however you may cancel the service at any time with one months notice.

What countries is the LiveFactory service available in?

LiveFactory has been developed and deployed in factories in Johannesburg, South Africa.  We are able to provide on-site installation, support and training in South Africa and the UK at present.  For other countries, we courier monitoring units to you and provide web-based configuration, support and training.

Is there a way to try out LiveFactory before signing up?

Please enquire about a risk-free pilot deployment at no cost for a month.  This allows you to evaluate the LiveFactory system on a single production line.  At the end you can either return the device we provided or extend the service.

Do you provide Lean Manufacturing consulting?

Yes.  This is available on-site in South Africa at present from an experienced black belt consultant who can mentor your teams to embed the LiveFactory culture and ensure you get the most value out of the system.