Time studies from video

Cameras record every second of every shift. Cobalt turns the video into time per unit, units finished and where the time goes, for every workstation. No stopwatch, and no one watching on the floor.

Get in touchSetup in one week. Results in week two.
One 8-hour shift at one workstation
Stopwatch study2 hours seen
CobaltAll 8 hours, every second
6am8am10am12pm2pm
“Getting this data ourselves would have taken us months, maybe a year or more.”
Vice president of operations, steel fabrication plant
“It's accurate. It's dead on accurate.”
“A lot of this we'd never have known unless someone sat out there and watched it.”
“We don't need to hire anybody else. Now we know that for sure.”

Compared with a stopwatch study

How much is recorded

Stopwatch study: A few hundred notes over a few days.

Cobalt: Every second of every shift.

Units finished

Stopwatch study: Counted by hand, if at all.

Cobalt: Counted for each workstation, every hour.

On the floor

Stopwatch study: An engineer with a stopwatch. People work differently when watched.

Cobalt: Cameras only. No one stands at the workstation.

Afterwards

Stopwatch study: The study ends.

Cobalt: Measuring continues, so you can see whether each change worked.

How it starts

  1. Day 1

    A call and a walk-through

    You show us what you make and where you think time is lost.

  2. Week 1

    Setup

    We use your cameras or install our own. Production does not stop.

  3. Week 2

    First results

    Time per unit, units finished and where the time goes.

Get in touch

Tell us what you make and about how many people work on the floor. We reply within one business day.

Questions we hear often