Automation, quantified before you buy
Free, engineer-built tools that turn a fuzzy "should we automate this?" into hard numbers — payback period, cost of downtime, and OEE — so your capital request stands on real math.
The tools
Start with whichever question you're stuck on. Each runs in your browser and updates live.
Compare what the process costs in labor today against the automation's price tag. Get payback period, annual savings, and five-year return.
Open calculatorPut a real number on an hour of unplanned line-down — lost margin, idle labor, and restart costs — then see the annual bleed.
Open calculatorAvailability × performance × quality. Find your true equipment effectiveness and how far it sits from world-class.
Open calculatorHow it works
Use any of the calculators with your own labor rates, cycle times, and equipment quotes. Nothing to install, nothing gated.
Want it packaged for a capital request? Send your figures and get a clean one-page assessment back — payback, projection, and the assumptions spelled out.
If you're ready to move, we point you toward vetted integrators and OEMs that actually fit your process — no cold vendor roulette.
About
Calkco Systems comes out of day-to-day capital automation work — speccing lines, writing requirements, running RFQs, and standing up equipment on real production floors across multiple sites.
Most automation gets bought on a vendor's optimistic quote and a gut feeling. These tools exist to replace the gut feeling with the same math an engineer would run before recommending the spend: what the labor actually costs, what downtime actually costs, and how the equipment actually performs.
The calculators are free because a good decision upstream is worth more to everyone than a rushed one. If you want a second set of eyes on a specific project, that's what the assessment is for.
Send the basics and get a one-page report built around your numbers — payback, five-year projection, and, if you want it, an intro to integrators that fit the job. No charge, no obligation.