Production Information Display Solutions: The Big Picture

 Program4 Engineering provides a visual Production Display Solution for plant wide display of manufacturing information. The PlantLogic solution is database centric and handles manufacturing information like production schedules, production cycle times and employee communications content served up in a configurable browser based application.

This solution provides common real time information to your manufacturing team even though there may be walls between them. Our expertise with solid code in manufacturing control systems laid a natural path to extracting information from the process. Browser based & license free, your company spending goes right to production information dispersal.

Program4 has designed and built our Production Display Solution for: pharmaceutical production, metals processing and extruded plastics production. The essential solution contains an information portal, a database link to process or MES data and the LCD or LED Displays. Displays can either be full graphic LCDs for clean spaces or high visibility LED Adaptive Displays for raw processing environments, indoors or out, wire or wireless: as your site allows. The content on each individual display is securely and easily user-configurable allowing each monitor to display selected information appropriate for its location in the facility.

    The base Production Display System is tasked with presenting the following four unique types of information on distributed display units throughout a facility:

• Production Schedule of products for the next week
• Cycle Times and steps to completion of scheduled products, and
• Communications Content [announcements, HR bulletins, weather, sports scores, training videos]
• Communications Content [announcements, HR bulletins, weather, sports scores, training videos].

We can tailor the information pulls to what is required for your process.

Architecture: Details

The Production Display System uses the existing plant Intranet Architecture resulting in significant installation cost savings. Each display unit consists of a LCD or LED monitor with a local display driver.
The information shown on the Production Display System is hosted by a Server running a license-free database and a plant wide information portal. Production information can be read from the plant’s existing Oracle ® or SQL Server System on a periodic basis.

In addition to hosting the web pages displayed on the plant floor, the server PC also hosts the Display System View and Control Browser. This secure web page interface is accessible from any PC connected to the facilities intranet and allows any authorized user to configure what and when information is displayed on each of the display units on the plant floor.

Cycle Time

Cycle times for each product work order are step based showing lot information and total elapsed time for each batch completed in the weekly schedule using colored data to tell the production team where they position: green is on or under target, red is over.
The Cycle Times are displayed in a tabular format on the system for all lots in progress. For production steps that are in progress, a running counter displays the duration of the step. If the step is complete, the date and time of completion is displayed. Completed orders remain displayed for 48 hours. Lots are assigned their color coding based on target times defined in the MES database. If more lots exist than can fit on the display, then displays rotate through all pages until total lots run have been shown.

Production Schedule

As part of the Production Display system project conversion, if your facility is using an existing Excel based production schedules, it can be replaced with a our Browser and database based application. Not only does this allow the Production Schedule data to be easily accessible for the Display System, it also includes a user friendly HTML based web page interfaces that can be accessed from any PC or suitable handheld device connected to the facilities intranet. No spreadsheet application is required at source or end-user PC.
Designed like the Cycle Time display in a tabular format, the Production Schedule for each line in the facility lists the current lot released plus the next three lots scheduled.

Employee Communications

In addition to displaying the tabular Cycle Time and Production Schedule, the Display System includes a user customizable Employee Communications feature. Included in the Employee Communications feature is an easily editable user defined text messages using HTML.
Because the Display System is browser based, any HTML formatted files, including World Wide Web content, can be shown on the system. In addition to company text announcements, this feature is frequently used to display the local weather, headline news and to show instructional training videos.
The user defined text messages can display any custom text up to 250 characters.

Display System View and Control Browser Interface

The Display System View and Control Browser Interface is a password protected web page that provides authorized users the ability to configure what information is displayed on each of the Display Units throughout the facility.
Each display unit is assigned to a Display Area in the facility. For example, receiving, manufacturing, packaging, etc. This allows multiple display units in the same area to show identical information. Display areas can be created, modified and deleted by authorized users.
Each Display area can pick and choose which of the above information is shown on that area’s display(s) along with the length of time to display that information before moving on to the next information to display. During editing, a preview feature allows the user to confirm that all information including user defined messages and HMTL files are formatted and displayed properly prior to posting.

Let Your Line Teams, Shifts & Management See Their Performance Immediately, Down Stream & Up.