Stop Measuring Spindle Uptime: The OMW Story

If the Headline Number on Your Monitoring System Is Spindle Uptime, You’re Measuring the Wrong Thing

Spindles can be turning all day, and your shop can still be losing money.

The spindle’s on, but the part finished 40 minutes ago, and nobody walked over to swap it out. It’s running a setup piece because the right tool wasn’t staged. It’s cutting a job you misquoted by 30% because you didn’t have the full picture. 

None of that shows up if the only thing your monitoring system measures is whether the spindle is on or off.

But that’s the number most first-generation monitoring systems put on the wall. Big, green, and reassuring. And when that’s the headline, that’s what your team optimizes for. Keep the spindles turning. Don’t let the green bar drop. You can hit a 90% spindle-uptime number and still be quoting jobs you’ll lose money on.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s exactly the trap a precision shop in Northern California was stuck in until they got out. And once they got out, one meeting with their largest customer turned into $2.5 million in new business six weeks later.

Meet OMW

OMW Corporation has been making parts for 30 years. They started in a garage in San Rafael in 1996 and have grown to 120 people, 43 machines, and five buildings across two facilities north of San Francisco. They specialize in mid-to-high complexity 5-axis machining, and more than 90% of their work supports the new space economy: launch vehicles, satellites, and the ground infrastructure that supports them.

Their competition isn’t local. For work that isn’t ITAR-restricted, OMW is competing against shops in Texas, Florida, Mexico, Turkey, and Vietnam. California isn’t the cheap place to do this work, and they know it. They’ve had customers ask them flat out, “How can you compete?”

The answer was never going to be price. It had to be efficiency, and the ability to prove it.

The Old System Was Telling Them What They Wanted to Hear

For years, OMW ran a homebuilt monitoring system the team called “MacBon”. It worked. Sort of. It measured one thing: whether the spindle was on or off.

That’s it. On or off. Spindle uptime as the North Star.

“When all you’re measuring is spindle uptime, your focus is keeping the spindles turning — which may sound like the right thing to do, but it’s not always the right thing to do. If your spindles are turning just to turn, and you’re not doing the right work at the right time in the most efficient way, you’re not driving profitability in your shop.”

— Michael Langston, President & COO, OMW

That’s the trap. A simple metric, easy to measure, easy to display, easy to hit. And almost completely disconnected from whether the shop is actually winning.

New Data, New Conversations, Different Outcomes

OMW brought Datanomix in on a handful of machines first, seven of them, intentionally chosen as a “Prove it” Pilot mix so they could see how the system handled different machine types. Four to five months of learning later, the whole shop went live on Datanomix in July of 2025. 

The first thing that changed wasn’t a number. It was the vocabulary.

Suddenly, the floor had words for things they’d never had words for. 

• Time-to-first-active (TTFA): how long it takes from the start of a shift until the first machine in a cell is actually cutting. 
• Long stops: when a machine sits idle in the middle of a run for longer than it should. 
• Common waste: the predictable, repeating idle time across machines during shift transitions. It hides inside what a spindle-uptime number would have called a normal day — and because it’s predictable, it’s fixable.

With new vocabulary came new conversations. Chris Radieve, OMW’s Director of Manufacturing Technology, picked TTFA to tackle first with the production team. They agreed on what was a fair standard per cell. They distributed weekly reports. They discussed staffing, shift transitions, and how many machines one operator could realistically handle at the start of a shift.

“It was just a heightened awareness of TTFA and what we’re gonna do about it. And slowly, we course correct.”

— Chris Radieve, Director of Manufacturing Technology, OMW

Nobody got fired. Nobody got yelled at. The team just had the same picture in front of them and made adjustments together.

A few months later, TTFA was trending in the right direction. They pointed the same lens at long stops. Same cadence. Same kind of conversations. Production Manager Kevin Early built it into the maintenance workflow, too. When a machine goes down for preventive maintenance, a single button press tags it, and everyone in the organization can see at a glance that the machine is down on purpose and that the metric won’t take the hit. Doing the right thing stopped being a numbers penalty.

What That Earned Them

Across 43 machines, OMW has gained roughly 12% utilization in under a year. At their scale, that’s enormous. The equivalent of adding capacity without buying a single new machine.

But the bigger payoff happened in March, in a room thousands of miles from the shop. 

OMW was in a transitional moment with their largest customer, ramping down on one established platform and ramping up on new, still-experimental ones. High stakes. High risk. The room was full of senior supply chain people — the kind who can move millions of dollars in a single afternoon. The question came up the way it always does: How can you compete?

This time, instead of explaining, Michael flipped his laptop around. Live machine data. Real utilization numbers. The story was told straight from the equipment to the customer 3,000 miles away from the shop floor.

Six weeks later: $2.5 million in new work booked.

OMW is sustaining 20%+ year-over-year growth and projecting more of the same for the next two to three years. None of that is happening because they’re keeping spindles turning for the sake of keeping spindles turning. It’s happening because they finally have the right conversations, in front of the right data, with the right people in the room.

Hear the story directly from the OMW team in a recent First Down Webinar: Competing on Data: How Machine Intelligence Wins More Work

The Culture Piece Nobody Talks About

This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. OMW has very low turnover. A lot of people on that floor have been there 10, 12, 15 years. Introducing new measurement into a tenured shop is hard. The reflex is predictable: “If you’re measuring me, I’m in danger.”

OMW’s leadership team made the case head-on. “We’re not collecting data to beat people over the head. We’re collecting it to get better, and to create more opportunities for everybody.” 

They started small. They picked one metric. They explained why it mattered, what it meant, and what they were going to do about it. Then they did the same with the next one.

Kevin Early, Production Manager at OMW, puts it best.

“Before, that hour just disappeared. Now someone walks over, asks what’s going on, and gets the machinist back on the job. Fifteen extra minutes of cutting time. Just like that.” 

— Kevin Early, Production Manager, OMW 

That’s how a shop actually changes. Not just with a roll-out and a kick-off, but with a metric and a conversation, and another metric and another conversation, until “common waste” is just something people say at the start of the week. 

So What’s on Your Wall?

Quick test. Picture the dashboard your floor sees right now. What’s the biggest number on it? If the headline number on your monitoring system is spindle uptime, you’re measuring the wrong thing. 

You’re optimizing for whether the machine is moving, not whether the work is moving. The two aren’t the same.

OMW figured that out. Their utilization is up 12%. Their largest customer just sent them $2.5 million in new work. And the conversations on their floor sound completely different from what they did a year ago.

Get the story straight from the machine. Then go have the conversation.

Watch the full webinar with OMW → 

Want to see what this looks like on your floor?