96 Hours Analyzed Overnight
A custom manufacturing company suspected their welding teams lacked work discipline. Power Belt Vision revealed the real story — and transformed how they manage productivity across shifts.
The Challenge
In a custom welding shop, components for future weldments were not placed in optimal positions. Welders spent a significant part of each shift walking instead of welding. Management observed large differences in output between shifts and high productivity variability even within the same shift on different days. Leadership believed the welding teams lacked work discipline and blamed the performance losses on other departments — but had no data to prove or disprove the theory.
The Solution
The company's technologist mounted a camera under the ceiling above 4 welding bays, recording video to the company server. Three full shifts were captured — 24 hours of continuous footage. The technologist uploaded the videos into Power Belt. Vision performed fully robotic analysis of all 12 welders, each across their full 8-hour shift. It identified value-adding activities, classified waste activities, and built 12 complete value analyses. Power Belt automatically compared productivity across individual workers and across shifts. The next day, the technologist received a comprehensive work analysis covering all 96 analyzed hours.
Key Results
What would have taken a team of analysts weeks to process manually was completed overnight. The robotic analysis revealed that the root cause wasn't lack of discipline — it was poor component placement and inconsistent workstation setup between shifts. Armed with data instead of assumptions, management redirected their improvement efforts to logistics and workstation standardization, leading to measurable productivity gains across all three shifts.
“We were convinced the problem was people. Power Belt showed us it was the process. That changed everything about how we approach improvements.”
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