Machine monitoring for small & mid-size factories
Your machines run differently the moment you walk off the floor. OwlWatch tracks the real run-time, downtime and utilisation of every 3-phase machine you own — and tells you the second a critical one stops.
A PLC can count cycles. It can't tell you that a critical line sat idle for three hours on Saturday, that one machine has run at 40% for six months, or that changeovers drag every time the floor is unsupervised. That hidden time is costing you — in throughput, in maintenance, in machines you're paying for but barely using.
Which machines are actually earning their floor space — and which are dead weight?
How much real downtime happens when nobody's standing there to see it?
Did your critical machine stop at 2am — or has it been running all night?
How it works
For most machines, plug OwlWatch inline at the socket. For high-current or hard-wired machines, clamp it on. Either way — minutes, no electrician booking a line shutdown, no integration.
OwlWatch reads every machine's power in real time and learns its rhythm — when it's running, when it's idle, when it stops. Around the clock, whether you're on the floor or not.
One live dashboard shows your whole fleet at a glance. The moment a critical machine goes quiet, you get a WhatsApp, SMS or email — instantly.
What you get
Every machine on one screen, updating in real time. Green means running. Grey means money sitting still. Read the health of your whole floor in two seconds.
Real run-time vs idle time over 24 hours, 7 days or 30. Find the machine that's been used 10% of the time for half a year — then redeploy it or sell it.
Every stoppage — when it happened, how long it lasted, how often it repeats. Turn "the night shift seems slow" into a number you can act on.
Set a threshold on any machine. The second a critical one drops below it, OwlWatch sends a WhatsApp, SMS or email — so a stopped line never waits till morning.
Same job, two machines — one runs 78%, the other 41%. OwlWatch puts them side by side so you can see which assets are pulling their weight.
A clean, board-ready report of run-time, downtime and utilisation — OEE-style availability without an MES — across your whole fleet. The kind of evidence that justifies a decision, not just a hunch.
Spread duty across your machines so they wear evenly — so you can plan maintenance on your schedule, not the day one of them fails.
OwlWatch tells the difference between a machine that's switched off and one that's lost power or dropped offline — so a blind spot never hides as "all good".
OwlWatch measures the difference — and hands it to you in black and white.
"In our first deployment, a critical machine's changeover ran noticeably longer whenever the floor was unattended. Management never knew — until OwlWatch put it on a screen."
A real machine on a pilot floor: 10% uptime over the week, and a single idle stretch of 4d 15h. You can't fix what you can't see.
From the floor
"For years I suspected we were bleeding output overnight but I couldn't prove it. OwlWatch showed our knitting hall running at 71% on day shift and 48% at night — same machines, same orders. That one screen ended the argument. I had a second night-shift supervisor signed off within a week."
"A compressor tripped at 11pm on a Sunday. My phone buzzed inside a minute — not Monday morning to a room full of spoiled stock. We had it running again before anything thawed. It paid for itself on that one WhatsApp."
"Head office kept asking why we wanted another machine when the ones we had 'were always running.' OwlWatch showed one of them earning its keep barely a third of the day. We redeployed instead of buying — that one report saved the capex outright."
"I braced for the usual shutdown-and-book-an-electrician saga. Instead we had three extruders monitored in an afternoon with no line stopped. When I had a question about alert thresholds, I got an answer the same day. Easiest piece of factory tech I've bought."
"We run industrial washers and dryers across two shifts and never really knew our true uptime. Install was genuinely plug-in — one machine just runs through the OwlWatch unit. Now I see the whole floor from my phone, and when something stops I know before my supervisor does."
Who it's for
Built for small and mid-size factories across South Africa — the SMMEs that enterprise OEE and MES systems overlook. If it's a 3-phase machine that costs you money when it's stopped, OwlWatch watches it — no PLC, no MES, no electrician.
Get in touch
Tell us a little about your machines and we'll show you what OwlWatch can do. No integration headaches, no obligation — just a straight conversation about what's really happening on your floor.