Method
How the work is done, and how to price it yourself
Two halves. First what actually happens in your plant. Then a calculator you fill in with your own figures, so the comparison against the published price is one you make rather than one I assert.
Part one
What happens, in order
Walk the plant
One to two days on site with access to the equipment and the control systems. I read the instrumentation and the control logic myself and check them against the drawings and the narrative. Short conversations with the people who do the work — operator, trades, whoever runs purchasing.
Read what you already have, however rough
Work records, shift logs, spreadsheets, manuals, photographs of a whiteboard. Nothing needs tidying first. The state the records are in is itself one of the findings.
Test the program against the failures
Every preventive task set beside what has actually failed. Tasks that catch real failures stay. Tasks inherited from a manual that have never caught anything get changed or dropped. Equipment with no task against it gets ranked by what its failure would cost you.
Capture records at the point of entry
Where it earns its place, the records get captured as the work happens rather than reconstructed later — including using AI to turn what a tradesperson writes or says at the job into a structured record. That is the only reason the next plan is built on real data instead of memory. It is a tool inside the method, not the product.
Write it for somebody who wasn't there
Plain enough to hand to your manager, your board, a lender, or your next contractor and have them act on it without me in the room. Design, specification and controls work are mine; fabrication and installation are subcontracted and supervised by me.
Part two
Your own number
I'm not going to tell you what your downtime costs. Published averages are weighted toward very large plants and they don't survive contact with a 50-person operation. You already know your figure within a few hundred dollars, so use yours.
Your figures
Every number here is yours. Leave anything blank that you'd only be guessing at — a blank line is more honest than an estimate, and the total still means something.
Lost production, wasted material, overtime, and anything you had to buy in to cover it.
Only the hours you can point at. Anything you'd have to guess at, leave out.
The whole plant down, not one line. Include the restart.
How many times the plant came to a complete halt.
An inspection finding, a reportable incident, a permit or certificate issue.
Remediation, the reporting work, the time it took off the people involved.
The working
Shown line by line so you can argue with it. Nothing is sent anywhere; this runs on your own device and is gone when you close the page.
Unplanned downtime
0 hrs × $0/hr
$0
Full production stops
0 × $0
$0
Compliance and safety events
0 × $0
$0
What last year cost you, by your own numbers
$0
Fill in what you know. Most owners have the hourly figure in their head and have never multiplied it by a year.
Part three
What it is worth outside the plant
The work pays for itself on the floor. But the document it produces has a second life the first time somebody outside your operation asks you to prove something.
The before-state, written down
Almost nobody records what the plant was doing before the work started. Stage 1 is that record — condition, losses, and the state of your reporting on a dated document. It is what lets you show, later, that something changed.
Documentation you can attach to an application
Ranked work, costs, reasoning, and a confidence level per line is the shape of evidence that outside money asks for. Whether you are talking to a lender, a board, an insurer, or an application process that requires a technical basis, you already have the document rather than assembling one under deadline.
Numbers your finance side can carry
Because the same figures feed the budget and the forecast, the operational story and the financial story stop being two different documents that contradict each other in the same meeting.
If the arithmetic holds up, the next step is a call
Twenty minutes about your equipment and where your chain breaks. Nothing to prepare.