OrbitX was founded by people whose backgrounds span manufacturing operations, digital transformation programmes for manufacturers, software engineering, and software consulting. Not consultants who have never run a line, and not developers who have never stood on a floor.
A consultancy arrives, spends eight weeks, and leaves a roadmap. A software vendor arrives, sells a licence, and builds to the specification in the roadmap. Twelve months later there is a system that technically works, a business case nobody measured, and a supervisor still keeping the spreadsheet.
Nobody in that sequence was incompetent. The structure was wrong. The firm that diagnosed the problem had no obligation to make the solution work, and the firm that built it had no view on whether the diagnosis was right. Everyone delivered their scope and the outcome still failed.
OrbitX exists to own the whole arc instead — from the first walk of the floor to the moment the numbers move. That's the entire idea, and every structural choice we've made follows from it.
A factory's functions aren't independent — maintenance affects quality, quality affects throughput, throughput affects energy per unit. In most plants they behave like scattered bodies with no shared reference. An orbit is what it looks like when they're held in a stable relationship around one centre. That centre is a single operational record.
The X is the build. Plenty of firms will describe the orbit. Considerably fewer will do the engineering required to put your operation into one, integrate it with what you already run, and stay until the floor is using it.
Not values on a wall — decisions about how the firm is put together, each one made to prevent a specific failure we've watched happen.
Every software vendor in this market must recommend their own product, because that is what a licence business does. We hold partnerships across the market precisely so we're never forced into one answer. Where a proven platform fits, we implement and configure it. Where nothing fits, we build. Where the honest answer is that you need a process fix rather than software, we say that — and it comes up more often than people expect.
The people who walk your floor are the people who will have to make their own recommendation work. It's a discipline that quietly removes a great deal of wishful thinking from a roadmap, and it means there is no moment where accountability transfers to someone who wasn't in the room.
Senior people on the floor rather than analysts gathering material for a partner to present. This caps how many engagements we can run concurrently, and we accept that. In a referral-driven market, one over-committed project is more expensive than the revenue it brought in.
You own the code, the documentation, the data and the admin access. We run structured handover as part of every engagement. A services firm whose retention depends on clients being unable to leave is a bad partner — we'd rather compete on being worth keeping.
The team combines people who have run manufacturing operations with people who have shipped production software — plus the transformation and strategy experience to connect the two. Neither half is theoretical for us.
That matters more than it sounds. Someone who has managed a shift knows why an operator won't use a system that takes ninety seconds when the whiteboard took ten. Someone who has maintained production software knows what happens when an integration is written point-to-point under deadline pressure. Both kinds of knowledge are hard-won and neither is available from a framework.
“Every factory operates differently. The mistake isn't choosing the wrong software — it's assuming the software choice was the important decision.”
The important decisions are which problem to solve first, whether the process should be simplified before it's automated, and who on the floor is accountable for the result. Get those right and several tools would work. Get them wrong and none will.
OrbitX is a young firm. We'd rather say that plainly than pad a website with stock photography and implied scale.
What that means practically: you'll work with senior people, we're highly motivated to make early engagements succeed, and our pricing reflects where we are. It also means we can't yet point at a wall of logos. We've structured around that honestly — the Connected Floor Audit is fixed-fee and standalone specifically so you can judge our thinking on a small commitment before making a large one.
What we do bring is the operating experience of the people doing the work, a method built from watching these programmes fail, and no commercial reason to recommend anything other than what your plant actually needs.
Every benchmark figure on this site is published industry research, labelled as such. We don't attribute results to ourselves that we haven't delivered and measured. When we have case studies, they'll carry the client's name and the numbers — and until then, this page says so.
Tell us where it hurts most. If we're not the right partner for it, we'll say so — and usually point you at who is.