The Amper Unlock, Part 4: Close the Gap

You’ve defined reality, set believable targets, and started running your day with live visibility. But visibility alone doesn’t create results. The real performance gains happen when factories move from seeing problems to fixing them for good.

Closing the gap means turning insight into action—eliminating waste, reclaiming capacity, and building a culture that fixes what matters most.

Why Most Factories Stall Here

Many factories see their problems but don’t close them. Instead, they throw CapEx at bottlenecks, chase symptoms, or accept firefighting as normal. The result is familiar: more meetings, more machines, and the same lost hours.

The gap between what’s visible and what’s fixed keeps growing, and so does the wasted margin. Closing that gap requires focus, ownership, and a commitment to making improvements stick.

Principles of Closing the Gap

• Every gap is wasted margin. Unused capacity costs as much as lost orders.
  
• Prioritize the biggest loss first. Not every fire matters—start where the impact does.
  
• Improvements must become the standard. A problem solved once isn’t solved until it stays solved.
  

Case Study: Rough Country

Rough Country used Amper’s shop-wide visibility and hourly scoreboards to identify where performance was stalling. Instead of investing in new machines, they focused on fixing the biggest sources of waste—sequencing jobs better, improving setups, and balancing labor around bottlenecks.

Within one month, bending productivity rose 50%. Robotics output increased 43% in six months. The project paid for itself in just six weeks, proving that the fastest capacity gains come from fixing what you already have.
Read the full case study →

How to Close the Gap in Your Factory

1. Run a loss Pareto. Identify and rank your biggest downtime or throughput losses.
   
2. Fix what matters most. Apply SMED and sequencing to reduce setup and changeover waste.
   
3. Balance resources. Move labor or attention to the bottlenecks starving your flow.
   
4. Assign ownership. Every recurring issue needs a clear owner and follow-up.
   
5. Lock it in. Standardize the fix immediately through SOPs or updated work instructions.
   

Why It Matters

For operations teams: Problems are fixed permanently, not just patched.
For executives: Unlocking hidden capacity delays costly CapEx and strengthens margins.

How Amper Helps

Amper turns improvement into a repeatable system:

• Loss Pareto dashboards highlight your biggest performance gaps.
  
• Downtime tracking and SMED tools make setup reduction measurable.
  
• Scheduling and sequencing features help balance work intelligently.
  
• Standardization tools ensure improvements are documented and sustained.
  

With Amper, closing the gap becomes less about chasing problems and more about compounding progress.

👉 Next up in this series: [Lock in Learning]

📘 Want the full framework? Download The Amper Unlock to see how manufacturers are compounding capacity, delivery, and margin every cycle.