Smart Manufacturing / MES
Shift Performance, Machine Utilisation and Quality in One Pane
Background
A plastics manufacturer running 34 injection moulding machines across two shifts planned production in spreadsheets and reconciled output the following morning from paper shift sheets. Supervisors could tell you what had happened yesterday but not what was happening now, so recovering a slipping order meant discovering the slip a day late.
The problem
The machine fleet spanned four vendors and two decades — some exposed OPC UA, others offered only dry contacts for cycle and alarm. Operators had rejected a previous MES rollout because data entry competed with running the machine. And plant-floor connectivity dropped often enough that a cloud-only application would have been unusable during exactly the shifts that mattered.
Approach
We normalised the fleet behind a single machine model: OPC UA where available, and a small retrofit counter module reading cycle and alarm contacts everywhere else, so every machine reports the same events regardless of age. A plant-local service holds the authoritative production record and syncs to cloud when the link is up, which keeps the floor running through outages. The operator terminal was deliberately reduced to four touch targets — job start, job end, scrap with reason code, downtime with reason code — because anything more elaborate is what killed the previous attempt. Planning, OEE, shift reporting and quality tracking build on that event stream rather than on separate data entry.
Outcome
The plant gained live order status against plan for the first time, and supervisors began intervening on slipping orders within the shift instead of the next morning. Measured OEE rose from 61% to 74% over eight months, driven mostly by downtime reasons finally being visible and attributable. Shift reporting that had taken a supervisor 45 minutes a day became automatic.
Our role
OT integration and retrofit modules; platform architecture; operator UX; OEE and quality modelling; rollout and training.
Technologies
Gallery
Figure 1 — OEE breakdown by machine and shift with availability, performance and quality bands..
Figure 2 — The four-target operator terminal mounted beside a machine..
Figure 3 — Retrofit counter module wired into an older machine's alarm contacts..
Figure 4 — Order-versus-plan Gantt with a slipping job flagged mid-shift..
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