The Problem
Sound familiar?
You're still running the shop floor on spreadsheets and paper while the rest of the business runs digital.
Machine setups and quality inspections vary from operator to operator.
Downtime keeps happening, but you have no records of the root cause.
Replacing and training skilled workers is becoming increasingly expensive.
You're managing production, maintenance, quality, and inventory like they're 4 different companies.
You can't train AI on operational data that isn't structured.
You're drowning in disorganized procurement and endless manual counts because you're managing thousands of unique parts and materials.
Introducing
Operational Lifecycle Management
Operational Lifecycle Management (OLM) is a new category of software that gives manufacturers a complete operational picture of their factory. Instead of managing production, maintenance, quality, inventory, and human workflows as disconnected activities, OLM connects them into one continuous operational narrative.
By capturing the operational knowledge created by people alongside data from machines, sensors, and existing software systems, OLM creates the foundation for predicting failures, reducing downtime, preserving expertise, and continuously improving operations.
Track every item the floor touches. Not just the material your ERP knows about, but the tooling, spares, and consumables — inserts, gaskets, filters, weld wire — that decide whether a run starts on time. Know what's available, what's committed, and what's staged at the line.
Monitor every machine, track every work order, and lead every product from raw materials to finished goods.
View every service call as a piece of the operational narrative puzzle. Immediately gain context on failures with full machine-level history. Allow operators to report issues whenever they happen.
Integrate quality assurance processes as part of the operational flow of the work order. Schedule audits and inspections whenever necessary and let automation take care of the day to day.
Define your operational workflows once and let the system execute them. Automatic task creation, status updates, alerts, and reporting, so your team spends less time on administration and more time on operations.
Off-Screen Actions
Every time a technician sets up a machine, a quality control specialist performs an inspection, or an operator makes a judgment call — that's work that happens off-screen. Away from any system. Almost never recorded.
In most factories, the only evidence of a completed task is a WhatsApp message that says "done."
Your best technician knows the quirks of every asset. When they leave, that knowledge walks out the door — because it was never captured.
How long does a typical setup take? Which parts fail most often? Which machines need repeat maintenance? Without field data, you're guessing.
AI needs structured data to learn from. If your most valuable operational activity is never recorded, there's nothing for any model to work with. The bottleneck isn't algorithms — it's the absence of real-world data.
When something goes wrong, the first question is: what happened last time? Without a structured record, there's no way to reconstruct the timeline. No audit trail means no answers.
EightyOne's mobile web-app puts customized forms in the hands of your employees. Not generic free text — structured workflows designed for their specific tasks.
Operational Inventory
Your ERP says you have 1,200 units of that component on hand. Your production supervisor knows the real answer is different.
Because 300 are committed to a job that starts Thursday. 180 are staged at the line. 90 are on QC hold and 40 are in rework. And the inserts, dies, gaskets, filters, weld wire, and calibrated gauges that decide whether tonight's changeover takes 20 minutes or three hours? Those are somewhere else entirely.
To be fair, most of that data exists somewhere. Your CMMS tracks MRO spares. Your WMS knows bin locations. Purchasing keeps a reorder spreadsheet. The tool crib has a logbook, and your most experienced setter has the rest in his head. The problem isn't that nobody is tracking it — it's that no single system holds all of it, and none of them is connected to the work actually running on the floor.
| ERP | CMMS / Tool Crib | EightyOne | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raw material & WIP | On hand, by the book | No | By state, not just by count |
| MRO spares | As purchased | Yes — crib stock | Yes — tied to the machine and the job |
| Tooling, dies & fixtures | Only if capitalized | Sometimes, as assets | Yes — with usage and remaining life |
| Shop-floor consumables | No | Rarely | Yes — abrasives, wire, filters, gaskets, PPE |
| Allocation state | On hand vs. nothing | No | Available / committed / staged / hold / rework |
| Updated by | Finance & purchasing | Maintenance | Operators & maintenance, as the work happens |
| Tied to production | To the order | To the asset | To the work center, job, and recipe |
| Answers | "What do we own?" | "Do we have a spare?" | "Can we run this job today?" |
None of these systems is wrong. They were each built to answer their own question. The one nobody was built to answer is the one the floor asks every shift.
Material, spares, tooling, and consumables — all tracked through the same operational lifecycle:
Why EightyOne
Operations teams have been stitching together software built for production, maintenance, quality, and inventory — separately. None of them were designed to give you the full picture.
| MES | CMMS | QMS | IMS | ERP | EightyOne | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unifies production, maintenance, quality & inventory | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ | ✓ |
| Designed for operations (not finance) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Instant implementation | ✗ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Structured off-screen data capture (mobile, no training) | ~ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Non-capitalized inventory (screws, cables, spares) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Maintenance work order dispatch | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Quality inspection capture | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Real-time site/production visibility | ✓ | ~ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Process automation across functions | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Full tech stack integration (works alongside existing systems) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ | ✓ |
| Affordability | ✗ | ~ | ~ | ~ | ✗ | ✓ |
EightyOne is built to work alongside your CRM and accounting software, not replace them.