Running Blind, Guessing, and the Tools You Should Ask For
Three Conversations With Datanomix Leaders on The Machinists Club Podcast
You can know your shop is running blind and still not know what to do about it. You can feel like you’re guessing on profitability, efficiency, and where the hours actually go, with no better option in front of you. And when you finally want better tools, it’s not always clear anyone’s listening.
That’s the ground we covered with Tony Gunn on The Machinists Club Podcast. Three leaders at Datanomix with one through-line: know when you’re running blind, stop guessing, and speak up for what gets built next.
Know When You’re Running Blind
Greg McHale, Datanomix Founder and CEO, started with the part nobody likes to admit: most shops are making decisions on surprisingly little real information. Your ERP systems track the plan, orders, inventory, and financials. What they don’t tell you is what’s actually happening on the floor right now, the moment it’s happening. That blind spot is exactly where Datanomix was born.
“Just get to ground truth. How are we doing? How could we be doing? What do we need to do more of? What do we need to do less of?”
Greg McHale, Founder & CEO, Datanomix
The shops that admit they’re running blind and fix it are the ones that pull ahead, because you can’t fix what you can’t see.
If you’ve ever made a call on yesterday’s information, start with Greg’s interview: The Shop Floor Blind Spot — Why ERP Isn’t Enough for Modern Manufacturers.
Stop Guessing on Performance
Annie Michaud, our VP of Customer Success, has spent years sitting in shops watching this play out. Her take: Most shops aren’t failing because of bad people or bad intentions. They’re running on instinct, and instinct built on decades of experience isn’t worthless. But it’s not enough anymore. If you guess long enough at profitability, efficiency, and where your time and money go, you’ll guess wrong. The floor won’t tell you when it happens.
“We call it turning the lights on. I thought I was at 60 or 70% — am I really at 30%?”
Annie Michaud, VP of Customer Success, Datanomix
That’s the shift Annie talks about in her video podcast with Tony, Why Modern Manufacturers Are Done Guessing. From gut feel to ground truth. It starts the day you stop accepting inefficiency as normal.
Speak Up For What Gets Built Next
Gabe Maentz, our VP of Solutions, closed the loop with a beat most software companies skip. The tools you run should be the tools you asked for. His answer to “how do we decide what to build?” was simple. You tell us.
“All of our greatest ideas really come from customers.”
Gabe Maentz, VP of Solutions, Datanomix
As one customer put it, “I’m in the business of making parts, not charts.”
In the podcast episode, How Datanomix Decides What to Build Next (Hint: You Tell Us), Gabe outlines how Playbooks, Planned Maintenance, G-Code Cloud + DNC, and the Spotlight Dashboard started with a customer saying, “Hey Datanomix, could you…” None existed a few years ago. All of them came from a real problem on a real shop floor.
Where’s it headed? Deeper into the systems you already run, and digitizing the analog stuff still floating around every shop. The whiteboards, the travelers, the sticky notes. If you’ve ever lost a piece of paper that cost you a job, you know why that matters. So speak up! The Datanomix roadmap has room for what you need.
Running blind, guessing, wishing your tools did more?
It’s why we built what we built, and it’s the difference between chasing yesterday’s answers tomorrow and getting the story straight from the machine today. Let us help you.
Not ready for a pilot?
Start with the on-demand Production Monitoring demo. 14 minutes. Your timeline.
