The shop floor
My floor runs on paper and WhatsApp groups
Solved byPatok Gemba
The shift's data, captured by your own people through a QR code.
Patok Gemba · Floor › Work
- A QR code on the machine
- No sensors, no PLC
- OEE, downtime and WIP, live
Get your orders
delivered on time.
Your customer calls before your report does. Patok tells you which commitment is at risk, why, and what to move today.
Every plant absorbs its variability in three ways: time, capacity and inventory. Patok measures all three with your real data and prepares the decision for you.
Start with a file No sensors No ERP changes
Discover more
The Patok family
Four doors. Come in through the one that hurts today.
Each door is a product with its own home and its own real screenshot. Find the sentence that sounds like your week and start there.
The office
The office holds up the line over one document
Solved byPatok Office
Office WIP, visible and measurable: three chains, six stations.
Patok Office · The Studio
- Three chains · six stations
- A case file with an owner and a due date
- Your ERP stays untouched
The analyst
My deliveries and inventory keep failing and I have no idea why
Solved byPatok Cognitive
A memo in your inbox, every day, telling you what changed.
Patok Cognitive · The 8:30 memo
- A daily memo, by email
- Reads your data and the floor's
- Connects to Claude and ChatGPT
The workbench
I need to run models without uploading my data
Solved byPatok Lab
Your engineering work as artifacts: the part, the drawing, the manufacturing plan, the program and the next run — and nothing leaves your machine.
Patok Lab · Milling › preview
- Runs on your own machine
- CAD, CAM, experiments, robots and simulation
- Nothing goes to the cloud
Would you rather see it all together? See the full platform →
The pattern
Four doors, one single method.
These are not four products that happen to share a logo. All four do the same thing, in this order, and the order matters: skip a step and the next one has nothing to stand on.
- 01Capture where the work happensThe data is born at the machine, in the order email, on the shift's paper. If nobody writes it down there, later it does not exist.
- 02Structure it with contextEvery record knows which order it came from, which machine, which customer and which shift. Without that they are loose rows.
- 03Analyze against the real flowNot against a monthly average: against today's queue, the buffer you have left, and the date you already promised.
- 04Recommend with evidenceWhat to move, how much and why — with the number and the record behind it, so it can be argued with.
- 05And let a person decideThe decision belongs to a person with a name. The system gets it ready, then measures whether it worked.
The rule
The system does not decide for you. It leaves the decision ready, with what it takes to make it and to defend it later. Someone on your team makes the call, and the record shows who did.
The four doors are this same pattern applied in four different places: the shop floor, the office, the data your operation produces, and the lab. What changes is where you capture and what you analyze. The method does not change — which is why what you learn behind one door carries over to the other three.
How Patok thinks
A complex plant.
Three levers of control.
Every late order comes down to the same thing: variability arrived and there was nothing to absorb it with.
How Patok thinks/TIMECAPACITYINVENTORY
Hundreds of events a day.
Work orders, machines, materials, queues, people, surprises. Each one moves on its own and no board can show them all.
All of it gets absorbed in three ways.
Time, capacity, or inventory. When variability hits, your plant pays with one of the three — even if nobody chose which.
There is no fourth. It is operations physics, not opinion.
When one goes out of balance, an order moves.
A machine loses capacity, the queue grows, and a customer's date slips. Almost always without anyone noticing in time.
Patok tells you which one to move, how much, and today.
Resequencing spends time buffer to give the order back its margin. It is an explicit trade, measured with your real data.
Not a dashboard to interpret: the specific intervention that protects the delivery.
Representation of the flow model · not a simulation of your plant
The complexity of your plant is not managed event by event. It is managed by deciding how it absorbs variability.
One door, in depth
And once the data exists, this is what happens.
What follows is one of the four doors told in full: Patok Cognitive, the analyst that reads your data and writes to you. The other three tell their own story on their own page.
How we work
We start with what you already have. With your technology or with ours.
A spreadsheet, an ERP, a data lake — or nothing yet. The starting point does not matter. What counts is that you leave with decisions.
Excel and spreadsheets Your ERP Emails and reports Your data lake Or nothing yet
The question that always comes up
— Does it integrate with our SAP?
— Your SAP already knows how to email a CSV. That is enough to start on Monday.
No API, no middleware, no IT project, and no vendor onboarding. Any ERP —SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, or one built in-house— knows how to schedule a report by email.
Starting is simple
Three steps, from the first file to a routine in your inbox.
1
You share a file
A spreadsheet, a PDF, or the report your ERP already emails. Through whichever channel puts you at ease.
2
We configure it with your rules
Your operating criteria, your products, your customers. Not a generic model: your plant's.
3
You get the first memo
Findings, risks, and actions. If it helps, we make it a routine — weekly or daily, you decide.
And when the data does not exist?
Any AI can read what you already record.
The trouble starts when the answer depends on something your plant never wrote down.
The question
"Why did the line stop on Tuesday?"
No downtime reasons recorded
There is no possible answer. No AI can read data nobody captured.
The most it can do is tell you production dropped that week — which you already knew.
With capture in place
"Tool change. 1 h 18 min. Third time this month on that same machine."
And with that you can decide: it is not bad luck, it is a pattern.
That is where the platform begins — and only as far as it needs to go to hold up the decision.
What it does every day
Someone should review this every morning.
And nobody does it. Not out of laziness — that is eighteen questions, and the shift starts at seven.
18of 18 reviewed
- DeliveriesWhich orders will not arrive on time?12 overdue
- FlowWhat is the bottleneck today?
- DeliveriesHow much margin is left on each commitment?
- FlowHow big is its queue?
- DeliveriesHow many did we deliver on time this month?
- FlowHow much can I release without saturating it?
- InventoryHow many days of coverage do I have left?2 below minimum
- MachinesWhere do the non-producing minutes go?1 h 18 unexplained
- InventoryHow much do I order this week, and of what?
- MachinesHow much time went into setup?
- InventoryWhat has not moved in months?
- MachinesWhich machine became this month's problem?
- QualityWhich defect repeats, and where does it start?
- MoneyWhat was delivered and cannot be invoiced?
- QualityHow much material went to scrap?
- MoneyWhich paperwork is missing, and since when?
- QualityWhat was closed without inspection evidence?
- MoneyHow much cash is stuck, and at which stage?
Your inbox · 07:00
Today's operation · Aug 4 · 12 overdue, 4 due today
Patok reviews all of them, every day. And it only writes to you when something changed.
Little's LawReorder pointPareto of downtime minutesCoverage by σ√LCONWIPp90 cycle time
You do not need to know any of these formulas. They are needed so the number is right.
And after a few months, the thing that really matters happens: the plant stops depending on you remembering everything.
What you get
The first analysis, with your own data.
Not a demo with someone else's numbers. You send a file your operation already generates and we hand it back to you, read.
- 3Key findingsWhat your data already says and nobody has had time to read.
- 3Operational risksWhich commitment is threatened and why, with numbers.
- 3Recommended actionsWhat to do this week, prioritized and with a suggested owner.
- +What data you are missingTo hold up that decision continuously, not just once.
First analysis
with your data
Findings
Where your load actually concentrates
Which material triggers your rush buys
How far your real lead time drifts from the promised one
Risks
Which commitments are threatened this month
Which material will run out first
Which workstation is limiting all the others
Actions
What to resequence this weekMR
What to buy before FridayAL
What to start measuring to sustain itJP
+ And what data you are missing to hold up that decision month after month, not just once.
You pick the channel. We start with whatever puts you at ease:
Simple confidentiality agreement Anonymized file Corporate email or secure folder
The cost of waiting does not show up in any report. It shows up in the delivery date.
Send us a file from your operation. We will tell you which of those questions it can already answer.
We do this for manufacturing and industrial distribution companies that run their own operation. Scope is defined in a first 30-minute session — this is not open-ended consulting.
The thinking behind the product
Built on operations physics. Math, not opinion.
Patok does not improvise: it applies the same criteria the engineering team behind Física de Planta teaches and uses in real operations. No Industry 4.0 hype.
PhD in engineeringAirbusRolls-RoyceUNESCOAWSMicrosoft
Background and experience of the engineering team behind the method.
Factory Physics
Lead time, WIP, buffers, and variability with proven theory, not rules of thumb.
Analysis in code
Python and statistics on your real data — reproducible and auditable, not a black box.
Proven in operation
Criteria and memos already used in real manufacturing plants, not in a lab.
Nothing to install
Start from your files and emails; no sensors and no changes to your ERP.
Google Cloud
Firebase + GCP
Real time
Sub-second streaming
Patok Academy · Plant Physics
Learn the flow before you buy anything.
The same doctrine that drives all four products, taught as a course. Start for free, get certified, and follow the track that fits you — with no platform to buy.
Flow Fundamentals
The course that explains why your plant stalls: WIP, throughput, lead time, queues and variability. No cost, no code required.
A verifiable credential
Every module you pass issues a micro-certificate you can share on LinkedIn, and finishing all 5 earns the Master Badge.
Three ways in
A free Open Track, Advanced Industrial AI modules, and Academy for Business to train your whole team.
The free course asks for no card and no commitment: an email address gets you in.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Patok lives alongside your ERP. The difference is that Patok focuses on the live operational flow: work orders, WIP, decisions, events, conversations, and actions. Your ERP stays your system of record; Patok is your system of intelligence.
Not necessarily. We can start with operational capture, QR, agents, documents, videos, or data you already have. How much instrumentation you need depends on the case. Many customers start with no extra hardware at all.
It is a complete adoption path. You can start with training (Flow Coach + Academy), move on to an assessment, and then implement the platform. The order depends on your maturity and your urgency.
That is what the assessment is for. We identify whether your biggest opportunity is on the shop floor (Gemba), in your data (Cognitive), or in the office (Office). The 30-minute adoption session is free and gives you clarity.
Yes. Patok Cognitive can turn scattered information — spreadsheets, PDFs, videos, emails — into a base you can query with AI, always with permissions, security, and scope defined up front.
It depends on scope. Flow Coach is live in minutes. An assessment takes 1–2 weeks. A pilot is scoped by processes, users, data, and the integration required. What matters is starting with the right case, not the biggest one.
Start with a real decision.
You do not need to instrument anything to start. With what your operation already produces, we analyze one commitment at risk and tell you what to move.
Send us a file from your operation. We will prepare the first memo.
30 min · No commitment Immediate clarity