Decision Guide

Five Decisions Every Production System Faces
And What It Costs to Guess

Every plant faces the same short list of throughput decisions, over and over. What changes is how much evidence is behind each one.

Decision Engine

Five decisions every production system faces. ReliaSim answers all of them.

These aren't hypothetical — they're the capital and operational questions that determine whether your next investment pays off or falls flat.

Predictable wear-out? Only 2–4% of downtime on a high-speed line. The other 95% of events aren't predictable before they happen — like bathroom stops and traffic jams on a road trip. You can't schedule around them. You have to design around them. These five decisions are how.

~1%
OEE accuracy
15 min
Model construction
1,000
One-year sims / minute
3×
Typical ROI multiplier
300+
Organizations since 1995
Face validity vs. statistical validity

3D digital twins look like your line — and can take 6–8 hours to run a single scenario. That's face validity. For strategic capital decisions you need statistical validity: a model proven within 1% of your actual OEE, fast enough to run a thousand what-ifs before lunch. These five decisions require the latter.

Capital Decisions — high cost, irreversible
Operational Decisions — frequent, hidden impact
🔧
Which fix yields the biggest gain?
Rank by system-level recovery, not downtime hours. The biggest loss on your Pareto is rarely the biggest improvement.
⚡
Run faster or slower?
Running faster makes more product but causes more failures — and you don't repair any faster. There's an optimal speed.
📦
How much buffer?
Protect the bottleneck so upstream and downstream processes never shut it down. Too little and you starve it; too much and you tie up capital. Simulation finds the exact size.
🔁
Do we need a second machine?
Compare equipment redundancy vs. reliability improvement on equal statistical footing — before spending capital.
🔄
Manual or automatic resupply?
Shutting down a perfectly running line every 15 minutes for a manual splice? Downtime analysis says it's worth half a percent — the simulation usually says 1.5%. That's enough to justify the automatic splicer.
"The only way to predict this accurately is through simulation."
— Tom Lange, 36 years Procter & Gamble
All you need to start: line event data — a CSV of machine stop-and-start times, recorded to the second. Not summaries. Not rolled-up totals. We handle data cleaning, parameterization, and model build.