Counting it correctly
The pilot pays back the moment it catches one unscheduled downtime event your foreman would have missed. Keep a downtime journal during the 30-day baseline: date, asset, what failed, how long the line was down, what it cost. This is the ledger you’re trying to beat.
Day 30 to day 90 — building the case
The first month after baseline is case-building on the dashboard. Recruit your maintenance lead, your reliability engineer, and your operations supervisor onto the dashboard. Watch three wear signatures together. Read the alert timestamps next to the maintenance log. The number writes itself.
Day 90 onwards — silent hours saved
Most Tier-2 plants see a one-pod payback inside the first 90 days. A single avoided weekend call-out pays three months of a $600/month subscription. The math is not subtle — it is just log-keeping.
Where the second pod’s payback comes from
The second pod pays back on a different line that’s running the same wear signature. You do not pay for a second pilot — you copy the ROI argument from line A down to line B, side by side. The leave-behind argument is the proof, not the new vendor.
When does it not pay back?
If your worst line runs at a duty cycle the pod cannot baseline (under two hours of run-time per day), or if your crew is already catching every degradation through routine walk-downs, the pilot’s signal-to-noise will not be sharp enough to justify a scale-up. We will say so on day 30 — that is what the baseline is for.