UK manufacturing SMEs face a challenging environment. Rising costs, fluctuating demand, and persistent skills shortages mean that operational inefficiencies can quickly erode profit and strain customer relationships. In these conditions, it is vital to identify where processes may be holding you back, and to take steps that help your teams work smarter, not harder.
Here are five signs that your operations may need a tune-up, and how Fitfactory’s solutions can provide the support you need.
1. Unplanned downtime is disrupting your business
The Challenge
When machines stop unexpectedly, the impact goes far beyond lost production time. Orders are delayed, overtime increases, and customers lose confidence in your ability to deliver. Across the UK and Europe, unplanned downtime costs manufacturers an estimated £80bn annually, with the average stoppage lasting around four hours. For SMEs working with tight margins, even short disruptions can have a major effect on profitability and delivery performance.
How Fitfactory Can Help
Fitfactory’s MES Machine Monitoring gives you real-time visibility of machine status, utilisation, and downtime causes. Automatic tracking and intuitive dashboards help managers quickly identify problem areas, while trend analysis supports a shift from reactive maintenance to planned preventive action. This enables you to reduce downtime, increase productivity, and give customers greater confidence in your reliability.
Things to look out for:
- How often machines stop unexpectedly
- Average time between breakdowns
- How long repairs take
- Average uptime across machines
- Percentage of jobs completed correctly first time
2. Scheduling is becoming increasingly difficult
The Challenge
For many SMEs, production planning often relies on spreadsheets or the knowledge of a single planner. This makes it difficult to respond to changes, leading to missed deadlines, overtime costs, and growing pressure on staff. In today’s climate, where demand can fluctuate quickly and resources are stretched, an outdated scheduling process increases delivery risk and impacts customer satisfaction.
How Fitfactory Can Help
Fitfactory’s Scheduler uses live data on machine availability, materials, and workforce skills to build optimised schedules that reflect real capacity. When circumstances change, the system automatically rebalances priorities, ensuring delivery commitments remain achievable. Combined with Shop Floor Data Capture, this creates a closed loop between planning and actual performance, helping you continuously improve efficiency and strengthen on-time delivery.
Things to look out for:
- Number of jobs delivered on time
- How closely teams stick to the plan
- How often bottlenecks appear
- Differences between planned hours and actual hours taken
3. You don’t have live visibility of the shop floor
The Challenge
If you are waiting for end-of-day reports or chasing paperwork to understand progress, your visibility is already out of date. Manual reporting is prone to error and slows decision-making, particularly as labour shortages remain a concern. In late 2024, there were around 60,000 open vacancies in UK manufacturing, with more than a third classified as hard-to-fill. When teams are stretched, timely and accurate data capture becomes even harder, making it difficult to respond effectively to challenges.
How Fitfactory Can Help
Fitfactory’s Shop Floor Data Capture (SFDC) provides real-time tracking of jobs, including productive and non-productive time. Operators can update job status instantly, giving managers live visibility of progress, capacity, and bottlenecks. This ensures decisions are based on accurate information, improves communication between teams, and reduces the risk of missed delivery dates. Paired with Fitfactory Insights, you can also access dashboards and alerts to monitor performance continuously.
Things to look out for:
- Jobs sitting in progress for too long
- Differences between expected and actual hours worked
- Time lost to waiting, setup, or other non-productive activity
- How quickly problems are flagged and acted on
4. Compliance and administration are consuming valuable time
The Challenge
Quality assurance and compliance requirements are essential, but they can be a significant drain on resources if managed manually. Paper-based systems, fragmented records, or missing documentation increase both workload and risk. Late-stage errors, such as incorrect drawing revisions or missing certificates, are common causes of rework and can damage customer relationships. For SMEs operating in regulated industries, these inefficiencies quickly add up to higher costs and lost opportunities.
How Fitfactory Can Help
With Tricorn MRP integrated with SFDC, Fitfactory ensures that process data, operator actions, and document revisions are captured as part of day-to-day operations. Certificates and audit trails can then be generated automatically, giving you full traceability from quotation to delivery. This reduces administrative effort, supports compliance with standards such as ISO and AS9100, and builds customer confidence in your processes.
Things to look out for:
- Percentage of jobs completed right first time
- Number of audit issues raised
- Time spent preparing paperwork for compliance
- How often document errors cause delays or rework
5. Data silos are slowing decision-making
The Challenge
When quoting, scheduling, and shop-floor updates live in separate systems, or worse, on paper, your business lacks the connected information it needs. This creates inefficiencies, increases WIP, and makes it harder to see true margins until long after the job is complete. For UK SMEs under pressure to improve productivity, disconnected systems are a major barrier to growth.
How Fitfactory Can Help
Fitfactory’s MES solution integrates modules such as Machine Monitoring, Scheduler, Shop Floor Data Capture, and Production Control into a single connected system. You can start with the module that addresses your most pressing challenge and scale as your business grows. This unified approach ensures that data is available when you need it, supporting faster, more confident decision-making and delivering real improvements in productivity and profitability.
Things to look out for:
- Time taken to convert quotes into confirmed orders
- Number of days jobs remain in progress
- Overall lead times from order to delivery
- Profitability of individual jobs
- How quickly stock moves through the business
If downtime, scheduling challenges, limited visibility, heavy administration, or disconnected systems are holding your business back, it may be time for a tune-up. Fitfactory’s MES solution provides the tools you need to reduce inefficiency, improve delivery performance, and build a stronger foundation for growth, helping your business succeed today and in the future.