Work in Progress and Production Scoreboard

PROJECT

Getting Runs on the Board at Smith's

CSE Technology has had a long association with the Smith's Snackfood Company in developing and enhancing their systems for production schedule monitoring and display. One of the advanced concepts adopted by Smith's has been to install a number of large electronic "Scoreboards" throughout their factories to display production and schedule status to all operators.

The Scoreboards keep track of factory production schedules and provide production staff with a system that tells them - like a gauge - where they are compared to where they should be, minute by minute, 24 hours per day. The system also tracks work in progress inventory.

Previously, the schedule for a given period had been manually created and monitored during production, with the workers on the factory floor having little or no idea of the current status of the production run.

The new systems consist of a network of PCs running Intellution's Fix HMI (Human Machine Interface) software under Microsoft Windows NT. These are the main interfaces to the Scoreboard system for supervisors and office staff. The Fix PCs provide the tools necessary to monitor production schedules, signal when production of a scheduled item has been complete and analyse production using historical trend and alarm reports on a product by product basis.

A Server PC also manages a relational database management system that holds the current production schedule as well as production data, work in progress inventory and a master product list. The Server communicates with an Allen Bradley PLC network that monitors data from the production and packing lines, enabling the Server to continually update the currently stored information regarding the production runs in progress.

The Scoreboards display data relevant to the current production schedule, as well as other information, entered from the Server or the Fix PCs manually. During busy periods, multiple pages of information are cycled on the Scoreboards.

CSE's involvement with this system included:

design and implementation of the database management system and associated control and reporting modules.
design and implementation of the Fix HMI software.
design and development of the software that manages display of the data on the Scoreboards.
design and development of the Work In Progress tracking systems.
integration of the existing manual scheduling systems with the new Scoreboard systems.