Custom IIoT Archives - MES Solution - FreePoint Machine Monitoring System

Top 4 Reasons You Need Custom Dashboards

August 31, 2022/in Machine Monitoring, Manufacturing, Technology

Cut through the noise by drilling down to the metrics that matter most to your shop, and to your people with customizable dashboards. Regardless of title, anybody within your organization can have role-specific views that quickly communicate the data needed to drive continuous process improvement throughout your operation.

What are the Top 4 Reasons Custom Dashboards Benefit You?

Showing the Right Data to The Right People
Viewing Data from Across Your Organization
Improving Decision Making
Quickly Identifying Issues

1. Showing the Right Data to the Right People

Dashboards provide an easy way of visualizing actionable, impactful insights into your process. Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, custom dashboards empower you to:

Create role-specific views for managers, supervisors, operators, team leads, etc.
Display the data that’s most important to your users
Customize your solution in a way that best suits your organization and your role

Customize ShiftWorx™ MES dashboards and shop floor monitors to display the data that’s vital to your continuous improvement initiatives.

By displaying metrics relevant to specific roles, employees within those roles can quickly and easily drill down to the data they need. Without the unnecessary complexity, manufacturers can react faster to issues on the shop floor while identifying areas of improvement within their control.

machine monitoring and downtime narration

ShiftWorx™ MES is accessible from any device using any web browser.

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2. Viewing Data from Across Your Organization

You can also leverage custom dashboards to enhance operational visibility. Integrating your ShiftWorx solution with other systems, such as ERP, gives you all the metrics that matter most to you in one convenient location. In addition, by displaying ERP, MES, QEP or CRM data alongside production data, you get the full picture of what’s happening in your shop – with no blind spots!

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3. Improving Decision Making

With intuitive, role-specific views providing real-time insight into your operation, managers and operators alike gain a 360° view of the processes that matter most in their organization. Deeper insight facilitates more informed and educated operational decisions while displaying relevant, actionable data to the individuals who can make a difference right away.

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4. Quickly Identifying Issues

Every manufacturer is different, so it makes sense that their Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) would be as well. As opposed to their off-the-shelf counterparts, customizable dashboards give you the power to view the information you need to quickly identify production issues.

Create and Display Your Own KPI’s that Reflect:

Machine Uptime/Downtime
Scrap/Waste
Production Performance

Experience the Benefits of Custom Dashboards

In manufacturing, a few minutes of downtime can result in massive revenue losses for the shop. By giving the right people the right information as they need it, staff can respond faster and with more accuracy when addressing production issues on the floor.

To explore what customization options are available in the ShiftWorx™ MES
platform specific to your industry schedule a demo with us today.

Click to read ShiftWorx™ MES customer reviews at Capterra and GetApp:

#SmartManufacturing #Industry40 #MachineMonitoringSystem #IIoT #ManufacturingExecutionSystem #MESsystem #ContinuousImprovement #ManufacturingAutomation #DowntimeTracking #OEE #LeanManufacturing

VIDEO: ShiftWorx Custom Reporting Through BI Tools

July 7, 2020/in Machine Monitoring, Manufacturing, Technology

When discussing the release of ShiftWorx Plus, we often touch on how we put more data at your fingertips than ever before. We talk about the enhanced customization capabilities for custom views and dashboard and today I wanted to discuss another similar critical element – How coupling the capability to capture Job and Operator data with the vast offerings available in the Business and Artificial Intelligence field creates a wealth of new insight extracted from ShiftWorx machine monitoring.

Machine Monitoring Reporting ShiftWorx Plus

As is the case with many Enterprise software products, we continue to evolve our reporting tools, though we will always be challenged to provide all of the reports in the exact format that a customer wants. There are simply too many ways in which each manufacturer wants to see data customized to their shop and process. This can be considered a challenge, but also creates an incredible opportunity.

Within ShiftWorx, many of our built-in reports and KPIs provide information across 2 or 3 dimensions – typically by DataSource, a TimeFrame and one element (Uptime/Downtime/Status/Job). With the release of ShiftWorx Plus, we have many more combinations of dimensions on which we can report including Day, Shift, Status, Operator, Job (where multiple Status/Operator/Jobs can be active concurrently). More reporting options provide a wealth of great actionable insight, yet can also make reporting more complex when reporting on elements like Operator Uptime/Downtime/Production by Job/Product by Shift for a 6 month period – especially where multiple jobs may have been managed by multiple operators.

To address this, we have developed a process to normalize ShiftWorx data for consumption by business intelligence and reporting tools, providing the opportunity to extend the data in a way that is valuable for manufacturers, consultants, and other value added partners who can mine this information for insight into areas that can improve the performance and quality of manufacturing process.

Below are a few sample dynamic dashboards that we created using Microsoft Power BI as an example of our management reporting capabilities. By allowing and filtering multi-dimensional data, you can drill down to the metrics that matter and have the biggest impact in your shop.

At present, this is still in Beta and we are fine tuning the capability and will be rolling out a production version over the next few weeks. So you can see this in action, we have created the video below where we move the levers and slice the data. If you would like a live demo of this solution to understand the power of these tools, reach out to us.

Getting Ready for the Restart

May 5, 2020/in Machine Monitoring, Manufacturing, Technology

Industry is getting ready to restart. Prior to the Covid crisis, you may have been contemplating things like connecting your machines to a system that gave you better visibility into production activity remotely and eliminating paperwork on the plant floor. If these things seemed like a good idea then, they most certainly must have moved up to near the top of the priority list now.

If you have been hesitating or were too busy to get started on this before but want to get a good jump on it now – before the full restart – give us a call right away. We can get your machines (or more machines) connected right away and have programs to defer the costs to later. Or, if eliminating the paperwork passed around on the plant floor is your concern and you want to start simple by digitizing some forms and checklists, reach out to us and we will connect with you promptly.

The new ShiftWorx Plus machine view tracking job, operator, and scrap.

I believe it’s now our time to be proactive. We have endured a long period with little choice but to follow and wait. Now is the time to act and to lead.

Looking forward to the restart with all of you.

Paul Hogendoorn
Founder and Chairman
FreePoint Technologies Inc.

5 Ways You Can Customize Your IIoT Experience

January 21, 2020/in Machine Monitoring, Manufacturing, Technology

As more manufacturers begin to transition to an IIoT environment, sometimes they may find an off-the-shelf solution just isn’t enough. At FreePoint, we think manufacturers deserve a custom solution as unique as their process.

To ensure manufacturers can take full advantage of their IIoT solutions, those solutions must be flexible, versatile and scalable. Flexible, customized software solutions can grow alongside your business, meaning you don’t have to keep purchasing additional solutions as your needs evolve.

In light of our recent acquisition of custom software development company: CoreSolutions Software – we have come up with 5 ways we can to customize your IIoT experience:

Custom Modules
Customized Production Scheduling
Customized Dashboards
System Integration
Data Mobilization

Custom Modules

Many IIoT solutions will come with a standardized set of features and functions to help manufacturers increase efficiency. Machine monitoring and downtime tracking are usually two of the most common features. However, by offering custom module development, we can develop unique applications that perfectly cater to your distinct workflows.

For example, our ShiftWorx Notifications module sends email and text alerts when a specific machine condition has been met. We can even customize the notification module to automatically trigger specific actions elsewhere in your system.

Customized Production Scheduling

For manufacturers looking to increase production capacity without purchasing new equipment or hiring additional employees – consider custom production scheduling. An asset to managers as well as operators, customized production scheduling allows individuals to prioritize the data most relevant to them. Management can focus on scheduling views and performance statistics while operators focus on task lists and work instructions. The best part about customized solutions is that they are tailored to fit your shops unique needs. Whether you want to:

Increase production capacity
Reduce changeover & startup times
Reduce time & material waste
Improve scheduling accuracy

Custom scheduling solutions can help get you there. From defect reporting, to ERP and MRP integration, custom solutions pack more of a punch then their off-the-shelf counterparts.

Customized Dashboards

Custom dashboards are another powerful means of obtaining actionable, impactful insights into your process. Every manufacturer is different, so it makes sense that their Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) would be as well. Rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, customizable dashboards give you the power to view the information that is most important in your shop, in real-time. Custom dashboards can also access data from across your organization, allowing you to more easily identify production trends and patterns, as well as areas of improvement.

System Integration

Another way we can customize manufacturer’s IIoT solutions is through custom system integrations. By giving manufacturers more flexibility, they can work across multiple connected systems and complete more tasks in less time. In addition, manufacturers will find custom integrations open the door for major process improvements. For example, by integrating IIoT solutions with ERP & MRP systems, manufacturers can supercharge their quality control, as well as their supply chain:

“If you can catch deviations from specifications when the product is being manufactured, you could easily stop and fix them. This would greatly minimize defective parts, if not completely eliminate it.”

– ERP Software Blog

Data Mobilization

Data mobilization is also an avenue through which we can customize your IIoT solution. Through CoreSolutions’ mobile application development, we can provide efficient, versatile, and reliable access to your data, regardless of where you are. Make your machine data accessible from company tablets anywhere across the shop floor, or even from your cell phone for the times you are off-site.

Final Thoughts

Industry 4.0 solution packages that are scalable allow machine and equipment availability to be increased and processes to be optimized. If you’re interested in processes that provide lightning-fast cost savings, provide a competitive advantage, and offer valuable real-time insight into your OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), you should consider machine monitoring.

Contact us to learn more about how we can create and customize an IIoT solution for you to call your own.

New API Enables Enhanced Integration Capabilities

June 27, 2019/in News, Technology

FreePoint Technologies now has an API that enables outside resources to connect with the ShiftWorx platform. FreePoint’s application programming interface enables you to access services outside of our user-interface. For example, within your ERP system, you can:

Get processed data for your machines and inputs as well as generate personalized:
- KPI’s
- Bars indicating machine activity
- Metrics for your organization
Get distinct On and Off states for your FreePoint connections.
(Identify which machines are running and not running)
Get information about your corporate structure
- Parent company / Child company / Machine / Inputs for each FreePoint remote

FreePoint’s API exists to support your internal development and applications without a front-end. In addition, it enables you to connect with your data while you build-out your own solution.

Please contact us to learn more about our API capability.

Tag Archive for: Custom IIoT

What are the Top 4 Reasons Custom Dashboards Benefit You?

Showing the Right Data to The Right People

Viewing Data from Across Your Organization

Improving Decision Making

Quickly Identifying Issues