Eyes-on Lean diagnostics for food manufacturing
Turn what you see on the line into pounds.
Walk the line and log what your eyes catch — downtime, speed loss, changeovers, giveaway, and the 7 wastes of Lean down to a five-second reach. Finder times it, costs it at labour rate, ranks it, and puts it on the boardroom screen. No sensors. No IT project. No OEE you can't defend.
Installs on Android · works fully offline on the factory floor · your data stays yours
From factory floor to boardroom answer in three steps
Built around how continuous improvement actually works in FMCG: a trained pair of eyes, a structured walk, and findings a finance director will accept.
Capture the line as you walk it
Add stations down the line, photograph each one, and log what you see: breakdowns, waiting, speed losses, quality, ergonomics, safety, 5S — two-level cause coding, timestamped, pinned onto the station photo at the exact spot.
Every sample builds the story
Pick the shift you're observing (A, B or C) — every sample stamps to it. Come back tomorrow, keep walking: samples aggregate across shifts, days and lines into one evidence base. Granular, side-by-side, or overall.
Ranked, costed, defensible
Pareto by station, cause, shift, line or day. The vital few highlighted. Losses costed by labour economics — crew × all-in rate — with the working shown on every figure. Print the report or present full-screen.
The real app, live — no mock-ups
Captured straight from Finder's demo factory: eleven packing lines, three shifts, every number produced by the engine itself.
- Your lines, ready to walkPick a line, continue where you left off — every walk keeps aggregating.
- The line's story, costed in £Observed loss, speed loss and the biggest issue — flick A/B/C to see each shift's story.
- Log it where you see itStations, categories, minutes — two taps on the floor, no spreadsheet later.
- Pareto: the vital few"2 of 5 stations drive 80% of the loss — fix these first."
- Every line, one pictureThe whole factory ranked — the boardroom answer.
Real screens from the demo factory, on a loop.
…then on the boardroom TV
The same walk, presented where decisions get made. One tap opens Present — a full-screen deck that counts the money up in front of the room: the total, the Pareto, the vital few, the 7 wastes, the fastest wins.
- Full-screen presentation mode — built for a conference-room TV, dark and cinematic, advance with a tap.
- The 7 wastes of Lean, costed — motion, waiting, transport and the rest, priced at a ratio of one person's time.
- Wide-screen reports, print-ready — the whole factory ranked on one display; every report prints clean.
Every lens on production line loss
The complete loss model a consultant works to — each lens captured on the walk and laddered to pounds.
The 7 wastes of Lean
TIMWOOD — transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, defects. Time a five-second reach, times how often, times how many people, and Finder prices it per day and per year.
Breakdowns
Mechanical, electrical, controls, jams, format tooling, utilities — unplanned downtime with the cause coded at capture.
Waiting
Starved upstream, blocked downstream, waiting for material, staff or forklift — the idle time nobody logs. The starve/block pattern also locates your bottleneck.
Speed loss
Target vs actual rate per product. A line running 20% under its rated speed loses money all shift without a single stoppage — Finder makes it visible and prices it.
Changeovers (SMED)
Time the change, split out the reducible portion, multiply by frequency — the classic SMED prize expressed as £ per day.
Giveaway
Overweight packs are free product out the door. Target vs actual weight × throughput × material cost per kg = the quiet leak, priced per hour.
Quality, safety & 5S
Too light, too heavy, seal faults, label errors, rework — plus ergonomics, guarding and housekeeping observations, all pinned to station photos as evidence.
Shift vs shift. Line vs line. Day vs day.
Same machines, different crews, different results — the comparison every operations director wants to see, and the one spreadsheets make painful.
- Granular: one shift's story in isolation — what B shift actually lost, and to what.
- Versus: shifts side by side, category by category, worst on the left.
- Overall: the whole engagement aggregated, with the vital few highlighted.
“B shift is where the machines go down — who's doing the setting on B?” That's the conversation this table starts.
Honest numbers a finance director will accept
- Labour-costed losses: crew on the line × your standard all-in rate = cost per lost minute. Every figure shows its working.
- No fake OEE: without sensors, an OEE number is a guess. Finder reports observed minutes, counted by eye, clearly labelled.
- Decision engine: the classic crewing question — remove a person, the line slows: worth it? — answered with throughput economics, and it refuses to answer when an input is missing rather than guessing.
- Constraint finding: starved/blocked observations plus rate checks locate the bottleneck deterministically, with the evidence trail shown.
Built for the factory floor
- Installs like an app on Android phone or tablet — opens full-screen from the home screen.
- Fully offline: capture everything with zero signal; it syncs when you're back in the office.
- Photos as evidence: every station photographed; observations pinned onto the photo at the exact spot.
- Your data stays yours: private account, cloud backup, one-tap JSON export.
Frequently asked questions
The questions CI managers and operations directors ask first.
Do I need sensors or machine integration to track downtime?
No. Finder is built for eyes-on observation — a trained person walking the line with a phone. You log what you see, timestamped and categorised, and Finder does the aggregation and costing. No sensors, no PLC connections, no IT project.
How does Finder cost production losses in pounds?
With labour economics: the crew on the line multiplied by your standard all-in labour rate gives a cost per lost minute. Giveaway is costed at material cost per kg. Every figure shows its working — nothing is a black box, which is exactly why the numbers survive scrutiny.
Does it work offline on the factory floor?
Yes. Finder installs on Android as an app and works fully offline — factory floors rarely have reliable Wi-Fi. Everything syncs to your private cloud account when you're back on signal.
Is this an OEE system?
Deliberately not. Honest OEE needs automated capture. Finder makes no OEE claims — it reports observed loss minutes at a clearly-labelled assumed rate. That honesty is what makes findings defensible in front of a finance director.
What is a line walk?
A structured observation of a production line — related to a Gemba walk: station by station, photographing each one, logging every loss event seen. Finder turns that walk into a costed, comparable, shareable analysis.
Can I compare shifts against each other?
Yes — it's central to Finder. Every sample is stamped with the shift running (A, B or C). View one shift's story, compare shift vs shift side by side, or see everything aggregated — and the same three views exist for lines and days.
Walk the line. Find the money.
One phone, one walk, and a ranked, costed answer to “where are we losing it?” — before the shift ends.
Open Finder