FMS Insight Cell Operations Pages

The operations pages are intended for the floor supervisor. These pages display information about the past few days of cell operation and allow the supervisor to keep the cell operating smoothly. (Anything older than a couple days should not be analyzed on the shop floor the heat of the moment but instead be addressed in a monthly review.)

We suggest that the operations dashboard is bookmarked by the supervisor and visited directly. There are also tabs for monitoring the operators at the load station, the machine cycle times, and all the material in the system.

Dashboard

The dashboard shows an overview of the current status of the cell. The supervisor should keep the dashboard open since it allows at a quick glance to understand if the cell is running well.

On the top are two progress bars which show the completed parts and simulated parts for all active schedules. The completed parts progress bar shows actual completed parts (finished unloading) and counts each process as a separate completed part. The simulated parts progress bar shows the expected number of completed parts at the current time based on the simulation. While these two progress bars likely won't match exactly, they should be close to each other if the cell is running smoothly. More details about schedules are available on the Schedules tab.

Below the progress bars is a bar chart of load and machine cycles for the past 12 hours and future 8 hours. The x-axis is the time of day with a vertical black line for the current time. The y-axis is the load stations and machines. Each load station or machine shows a green bar for a each actual completed cycle and a gray bar for each simulated cycle. For machine cycles which are currently executing or load/unloads in progress, a light-green bar is shown for the expected remaining time in that cycle.

The color of each bar indicates the status of the cycle compared to the statistics of previous cycles in the past month. If the cycle is at or below the expected cycle time, it will be shown in green. If the cycle is longer than the expected cycle but still within the statistical deviation, the portion of the cycle beyond the expected time will be shown in dark green. If the cycle is longer than the expected cycle and outside the statistical deviation, it is classified as an outlier and the portion of the cycle beyond the expected time will be shown in red. In addition, a list of all the outlier cycles (those with red) can be viewed in the reports tab.

Cell

The Cell tab shows an overview of the cell. Each machine, load station, and pallet is displayed with the material currently on the pallets. Each piece of material can be clicked to open show details about the material. This page is identical to the system overview pages available on the shop floor.

Material

The Material tab displays all virtual whiteboard regions. This includes the regions for all pallets and all configured in-process queues. It differs from the cell tab in that the material currently in all the queues is also included.

Material can be moved between the various queues by clicking and dragging on the 6-dots on the left of the material card. Material can only be moved between non-active queues (for example for quarantine or other tracking). Material cannot be added or removed to active queues currently being used for machining here. Instead, material must be added or removed on the shop floor using the Queues page.

Reports

The Reports tab shows a collection of reports useful for the floor supervisor. These reports focus on the past few days of operations and highlight places where the cell is performing well or poorly. More detailed reports are available on the flexibility analysis page. In our experience, the floor supervisor should focus only on keeping the cell running; longer-term analysis is best done by a one-a-month or once-a-quarter review.

Reports include the data from the machine engineering page and similar reports for the load station, data for tools and programs, reports for quality control, information for sales, and more.