Every machine on the line reports its own state continuously. The people running it report theirs at the shift meeting.
Sloane Labs is the human readiness layer for advanced technology and manufacturing. It reads recovery, circadian state and cognitive load across engineering, production and shift teams, forecasts where yield and handover integrity will degrade, and acts before the escape reaches the customer.
Yield is modelled against process variables. The largest remaining variable is physiological and unmeasured.
Every tool on the line is instrumented, every process window is controlled and every deviation is investigated. The operators and engineers holding those windows are assessed by how they look at the shift meeting, in a business where a single missed deviation costs more than the entire monitoring programme.
Shift structure, not individual effort, decides where risk concentrates. Rotation direction, run length and handover timing produce very different physiological outcomes from patterns that look identical on a roster, and those differences are measurable.
Four places capacity turns into outcome
The night shift
Sustained attention on process monitoring degrades sharply in the back half of a night shift and further across consecutive nights.
The handover
Most quality escapes trace back to a transition where the outgoing shift was at the end of its physiological rope.
The ramp
Under a ramp or qualification, engineering groups run at peak for months.
The specialist bench
Process specialists take years to build and cannot be hired quickly.
A ramp, read the way you read the line
Shift and engineering readiness through a ramp, with the forward projection that lets you change a rotation, extend a handover overlap or resequence a qualification before yield and escapes move.
Select an operating state to redraw the forecast.
Standard three shift rotation at planned volume. Recovery clears between cycles and readiness holds inside the tolerance band.
No intervention. The shift brief confirms the rotation is sustainable at current volume.
What we read, and what each signal decides
A signal earns its place only if it changes an operational decision. Anything that does not is telemetry for its own sake.
What is actually running, not what is on a roadmap
Shift readiness brief
A single page before the shift meeting. Crew readiness, what changed overnight, the two areas to watch, and one recommended action.
Cohort readiness by area
Production shifts, process engineering, maintenance and quality reported as separate cohorts with trend lines. No cohort renders below five people.
Forward risk alerts
When a crew is forecast to cross a readiness threshold inside 72 hours, the alert fires with contributing factors and stated confidence.
Rotation simulation
Model a shift pattern before you commit. Change rotation direction, run length or handover overlap and see the projected effect on the crew.
Individual agent, opt in only
Staff who opt in get their own coach: circadian guidance around the rotation, recovery targets between runs, answers grounded strictly in their own data. Nothing is visible to management.
Safety and quality evidence
An aggregated, anonymised record of how fatigue risk was managed. Defensible with the safety committee, auditors and staff representatives.
Reading human capacity only works if the boundary is unambiguous
Trust is the adoption constraint. These are commitments, written into the agreement, not preferences.
Never a fitness for work tool
Explicitly excluded from disciplinary process, shift allocation penalties and occupational health determinations. That exclusion is contractual and enforced in the data model.
Opt in, always
No one is enrolled by default. Participation is individual, explicit and revocable at any time, with data deleted on withdrawal.
Five person minimum cohort
Aggregate views suppress any group smaller than five. Leadership sees cohorts, never a named individual's physiology.
Metadata, never content
Calendar and messaging integrations read timing, density and participant counts. Titles, bodies and message content are masked at ingestion and never stored.
Separated from selection
Contractually and architecturally excluded from selection, appraisal and disciplinary processes. That separation is written into the agreement.
UK GDPR and DPIA ready
Lawful basis, retention schedule, data subject rights and a pre drafted DPIA template supplied for your DPO before the first device is connected.
Every tool on the line reports its own state. The crew reports theirs at the shift meeting.
An eight week pilot with a defined exit
We take a small number of design partners per sector. A partner shapes the roadmap directly, gets preferential terms, and keeps the right to walk away at week eight with no obligation.
Scope and governance
Agree cohorts, success measures and the data boundary. DPIA reviewed and signed. Integrations connected in a sandbox with a small internal group.
Baseline
Volunteers connect wearables and calendars. Individual baselines establish across a normal cycle and a peak one. No alerting yet, observation only.
Live briefing
Morning readiness briefs start reaching leadership. Forecast alerts switch on. Calibration against what the organisation already believes about its own load.
Readout and decision
Joint review of accuracy, adoption and the decisions the signal changed. Written readout, roadmap input, and a clear go or no go.
What we need from you
- One executive sponsor with authority over how work is scheduled
- Twenty to fifty volunteers across two or three cohorts
- Calendar and messaging integration approved by IT and the DPO
- Two review sessions across the eight weeks
What you get
- Full platform access for the pilot cohorts, configured to your operating calendar
- Direct roadmap influence on capability specific to your sector
- A written readout of accuracy, adoption and decisions changed
- Preferential terms and first refusal on the sector in your market
The questions we get asked first
Does it connect to production or design systems?
Never. There is no connection to MES, PLM, SCADA or any engineering system. Sloane reads consenting wearable signals plus roster and calendar metadata only.
Is this a fatigue compliance tool?
It produces the evidence a fatigue risk management system needs, but it is not a fitness for work gate. It informs how shifts are designed, not whether an individual may work.
Could it be used against an individual?
Architecturally, no. Individual physiology is never exposed to management; leadership sees cohorts of five or more, and disciplinary use is contractually prohibited.
Will union or works council consultation be difficult?
Rarely, where the boundary is real. Opt in participation, aggregate only reporting, contractual exclusion from disciplinary process and deletion on withdrawal are the terms that make consultation straightforward.
What does integration require from IT?
Roster ingestion plus optional calendar and messaging metadata. No endpoint agents, no OT network access, no changes to the production environment.
How do we know the signal is real?
Every score is deterministic and reproducible from versioned features, every forecast carries stated confidence, and the pilot readout compares prediction against what the site observed.
Instrument the crew the way you instrument the line
A thirty minute conversation covering the architecture, the data boundary and what an eight week pilot would look like on your site.