Bridging the gap between planning and execution reality

At the heart of MES is Shop Floor Control. Shop Floor Control is a real–time database of shop floor activity including new work, current work–in–progress and completions. As work moves through the plant and operations are completed, you receive instant feedback so you can respond effectively.

Shop Floor Control takes the data acquired from plant floor work centers and presents it to operators, supervisors and mangers via electronic dispatch screens that are as current as the latest transaction. That means your key shop floor people can actively monitor shop floor activity from anywhere in the enterprise. They can also constantly review and adjust priorities to maximize throughput.

SFC Functions

TCM’s Shop Floor application provides a robust set of functions designed to maximize your shop floor activity.

The TCM Navigator (shown here) gives you one-click access to the many functions accessible through Shop Floor Control, including management, scheduling, status inquiry and reports, transaction management, history and archives.

Shop Order Worksheet

Here’s a Shop Order Worksheet. All the data you need access to is available from this display. You can see any attached documents, the Shop Order Bill of Materials, and operational routing data.

Display Details including Planned vs Actuals

You can easily display details for any item, including planned and actuals.

Transaction Details

You can select any transaction and quickly drill down to display the details at the transaction level.

Virtual Scheduler’s Workbench

The Virtual Scheduler’s Workbench makes scheduling easy with a complete set of capacity and load adjustment tools. Displays like this allow you to conduct graphical scheduling – and you can even define your own color scheme!

In this example, we have set overloads to display in red. Let’s respond to the overload shown for workstation 41, Injection molding. The next few screenshots illustrate one way to respond to this overload.

Responding to Overload

Here’s the Workstation Maintenance form for workcenter 41. The Scheduling defaults are displayed, and you can adjust them. For this example, we’ll adjust the capacity by adding a station to resolve the overload we saw in Visual Scheduler’s Workbench.

Problem solved!

You can see at a glance that the problem is solved. The red overloads turns to yellow after the capacity change is made.