For decades, manufacturers have relied on a familiar mix of spreadsheets, whiteboards and manual reporting to understand what’s happening on their factory floors. These traditional tools have served their purpose, but as machines become more capable, customer expectations rise and margins tighten, manufacturers seeking ‘more’ as well as those under pressure are seeking new ways to increase productivity and capacity without significant capital spend.
This pressure has sparked a shift from manual, fragmented data reporting towards real-time, data-driven decision-making. And this is exactly where FourJaw helps manufacturers transform their performance.
The limitations of traditional data collection approaches
Most factories (industry reports suggest upwards of 70%) still use some combination of:
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Paper forms and downtime sheets
Operators are asked to record stoppages and issues as they happen. In reality, these sheets are often incomplete or filled out after a shift ends, leading to guesswork rather than accurate data.
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Whiteboards and daily stand-ups
Useful for communication, but the data captured is often outdated, subjective and inconsistent across teams.
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Spreadsheets and end-of-shift reports
Valuable for trend analysis, but time-consuming to maintain and almost always retrospective.
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Basic machine data systems
Some equipment provides status lights or built-in counters, but these are rarely connected, standardised or actionable.
These approaches all share one thing in common: they rely heavily on people manually collecting and interpreting data, which leads to three big problems:
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Inaccuracy – When reporting depends on memory or estimation, the picture of production becomes blurred.
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Lack of timeliness – Issues are discovered hours or even days later (and in some cases not at all), long after the opportunity to fix them.
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Limited visibility – Managers get fragments of information, not a complete factory-wide view.
As a result, many manufacturers struggle to identify their real constraints, justify investment, or confidently drive continuous improvement.
How modern data collection methods change the game
There are a number of modern data collection systems that have appeared on the market in recent years, with FourJaw being one of them. What's uniquely different about FourJaw, though, is that it has been designed to get 80% of the key production data with just 20% of the effort Vs alternative solutions.
This simplicity ensures the technology can be deployed quickly, integrated into business processes efficiently, and the data insight acted upon just as rapidly. So how does it work?
Using simple, non-invasive IoT hardware, FourJaw's MachineLink connects directly to almost any machine to capture utilisation, cycle times, and stoppages automatically. This eliminates the need for manual reporting and provides an objective, minute-by-minute view of what’s happening.
The image shows one of the two sensors used to capture machine utilisation data.
Clear production insights, not just raw data
Where traditional data collection tools present numbers, FourJaw presents answers.
The platform highlights:
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The true causes of downtime
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Bottlenecks limiting throughput
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Opportunities to increase capacity
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Underperforming shifts, processes, or machines
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Trends that operators and managers can act on immediately
This helps teams make informed decisions in real time, rather than relying on retrospective reports.
The image shows a production manager looking at real-time production data on the dashboard within their FourJaw account.
Designed for the modern workforce
Operators can log reasons for stoppages in seconds using tablets or existing devices. Dashboards are intuitive, visual and consistent across teams, allowing everyone, from operators to managers, to speak the same language.
The result? A culture of ownership, engagement and continuous improvement.
Real, Measurable Impact
Proactive manufacturers typically achieve 10–20% productivity improvements within months, unlocking significantly more output from their existing machines. Some see even greater gains by targeting high-frequency, high-impact sources of lost time that previously went unnoticed.
These improvements reduce lead times, increase capacity, and improve customer delivery performance, without major capital investment. Check out some of our manufacturing success stories to see for yourself.
The image shows the percentage uplift from the baseline machine utilisation across five machines at Lister Windows after using FourJaw for six months.
A modern alternative that’s already proving its value
Across aerospace, automotive, pharma and medical, building products, food and beverage and a hold load of other industries, FourJaw has become the go-to solution for teams looking to modernise their approach to manufacturing data collection to drive productivity.
Traditional tools will always have a place in the factory. But relying on them alone limits a manufacturer’s ability to compete in today’s data-driven world.
FourJaw gives manufacturers the visibility, control and confidence they need to drive performance every day, turning hidden production inefficiencies into measurable improvements and supporting a modern, connected, continuous improvement culture.
