Machines fail regularly, work orders are hard to track, tools and parts are hard to find and machine maintenance is erratic. The main cause of these issues are limited visibility of what’s happening on the shop floor and the lack of communication between machines and personnel.
In a conventional shop floor setup, machines operate individually and are not connected to a particular monitoring system.
Due to this, the shop floor worker has to constantly, manually keep tabs on machine performance, availability and ensure that work order allocation happens evenly across all the machines. This is easier said than done, as there are multiple orders to attend to simultaneously and multiple machines to monitor. In the rush of completing customer orders, machines are over-worked leading to their breakdown and production disruption.