If you run Shop-Trak, you already have something most shops don’t: accurate, real-time labor and production data straight from the floor. You know who’s on the job, what operation they’re running, and how many good parts came off it, without chasing paper travelers at the end of the shift.
But labor data can only tell you so much. It tells you the who and the when. It doesn’t always tell you the why. Why a run took longer than it should have, why a machine sat idle between jobs, or where the quiet minutes went that erode your margin. For that, you have to ask the machine itself. And for most shops, the machine still isn’t part of the conversation. Or where it is, getting it there took more work than it should have.
That’s where Machine-Trak comes in. Machine-Trak is our machine-monitoring product, and it’s available today. It reads your equipment directly, no one keying anything in. What we’re building now is the connection between Machine-Trak and Shop-Trak, so the story your operators tell and the story your machines tell land on the same screen. That integration releases in Q4 2026.
What Machine-Trak does today
- Reads your equipment directly. Uptime, downtime, cycle times, straight off the machine, as it happens. Factual, and hard to argue with in a production meeting.
- OEE and utilization grounded in machine data. Not what someone remembered to enter at the end of a shift. What the equipment actually did, feeding the same manufacturing analytics you already report on.
- Runs on its own. Machine-Trak doesn’t wait on anything else. You can put it on your floor now and start collecting.
What the Shop-Trak integration adds, this Q4
- Machine data tied to the job. Today Machine-Trak tells you what the machine did. The integration ties that to the specific work order running on it, so uptime, downtime, and cycle performance land against a job, not just a machine. Far less of a black hole between “material went in” and “parts came out.”
- Machine truth reconciled with labor reporting. Your reported numbers are only as good as what gets keyed in. Pairing machine data with Shop-Trak’s labor reporting closes the gap between what someone entered and what actually ran.
- A faster path to root cause. Got a number you don’t like? Drill from the job, to the machine event, to the reason, so getting to root cause is an afternoon, not a three-month study.
- Built to fit what you already run. The integration plugs in as Shop-Trak’s machine-integration layer. It doesn’t replace anything, and it doesn’t change the workflows your operators use every day.
Why we’re building it
Most manufacturers have chased this for years and settled for workarounds: spreadsheets, manual tallies, gut feel. The reason it was so hard is that labor systems and machine systems grew up separately and never really talked. Bringing them together is exactly the kind of problem that 40-plus years of building shop-floor software has taught us to solve well.
Direct machine integration isn’t new to us. We’ve done it before, and it worked. But it was a project every time, not something we could hand to any shop running Shop-Trak. What’s different now is that both ends are ours. Machine-Trak is ours, Shop-Trak is ours, and that’s what lets this be built in rather than bolted on.
Machine-Trak joins Shop-Trak, Doc-Trak, Fact-Trak, and APS-ME, and it won’t be the last thing we add. We’ll have more to say about where all of this is heading before long.
See it on your own machines
Machine-Trak is available now, and it doesn't wait on the Shop-Trak integration to be useful. If you'd like to talk it through first, book an introductory call and we'll walk you through what it picks up on a floor like yours.
Or tell us you're interested and we'll keep you posted as the Q4 integration gets closer.
