DOVA vs. One-time Consulting

A project fades. A system compounds.

Hiring a consulting firm to improve your plant costs six figures up front and delivers a report. DOVA costs a few hundred dollars a month and keeps delivering — as long as you keep using it. Here is how the math actually works.

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One-time consulting

McKinsey, Deloitte, boutique operations firm

Cost: $50k–$500k+ upfront
Timeline: 3–6 months, then it ends
Visibility after: A PDF. Slide decks.
What happens at month 12: Gains have faded — nobody is watching anymore
Who uses it day-to-day: Almost nobody after the team leaves

DOVA

Continuous production tracking

Cost: From $55/month ($660/year)
Timeline: Live in one day — runs forever
Visibility after: Live dashboard. Every shift. Every day.
What happens at month 12: You've compounded a year of improvements — with data to prove it
Who uses it day-to-day: Operators, supervisors, plant manager — all of them

The math, visualized

Twelve-month cumulative dollars for an example plant: 20 machines, 10 shifts a week, 8 hours a shift, $80 hourly loaded cost. Consulting is a big hole you climb out of; DOVA is a straight line that keeps going.

DOVA at month 12 (net)

$347,083

After subtracting the full year of $2,088 in subscription.

Consulting at month 12 (net)

-$22,917

Assumes $50,000 upfront with benefits fading over 12 months.

Numbers above use published industry benchmarks (McKinsey, Deloitte: 30–50% unplanned-downtime reduction with digital manufacturing tooling). Your results depend on your plant. Run your own numbers on the ROI Calculator.

When a consultant is still the right call

We are not anti-consulting. Consultants are the right answer for some problems — just not the “I want to know what is happening on my shop floor today” problem. Hire a consultant when:

You are re-engineering a process (not measuring one) — e.g. redesigning a line layout or rolling out lean across a multi-plant network.
You need an outside executive opinion for your board, not daily operational data.
You already have measurement tooling in place and need a focused root-cause engagement on a specific problem.

What consultants are not good for:

Telling you what your plant did yesterday. (A live dashboard does that, for less money, forever.)
Building permanent habits after they leave. They cannot force operators to log downtime six months after the invoice clears.
Tracking whether their own recommendations actually stuck. Without ongoing measurement, nobody knows.

Run the numbers for your plant.

Type in your machine count and shift pattern — the ROI Calculator will show you the same chart with your numbers. Or book a 30-minute demo and we'll walk you through it live.

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