ShopVue MES Software

With ShopVue’s Shop Activity / Labor Module, Operator transactions can be as simple as scanning a barcode to track direct and indirect activities. The highly configurable Operator Console interface is designed to keep the employee’s time at the terminal to an absolute minimum. For example, Operators can complete some interactions—such as “incremental” reporting of another pallet complete—by simply pressing a button. ShopVue’s labor tracking software includes numerous validations to help ensure accurate data. Supervisors can track labor efficiencies and WIP status in real time and continuous updates to your ERP system improve its planning and tracking functions.

With Shop Activity / Labor, you can scan bar-coded Travelers, capture direct and indirect labor, track quantities as they complete each operation, record scrap against multiple reason codes, offer one GUI for Operators to record all important events, share information across the workforce, monitor labor efficiency, and continuously update WIP status in your ERP and APS systems.

Simplify employee Time and Attendance by consolidating with ShopVue’s shop floor data collection and production control system to help monitor activity, manage labor costs, and improve workforce efficiency.

Record attendance from badge scans, automatically calculate attendance intervals, and schedule employees to shifts, work center assignments, and days off.

Perform calculations based on your company’s policies, including punch adjustments, lunch/ break extraction, overtime, and shift differential. Automatically adjust punch handling to conform to your company’s policy.

Manage by exception; edit and approve transactions online in just minutes. View an entire week’s attendance activity and automatically approve all punches that conform to expected behaviors. The system assigns “exceptions” to unusual behaviors (e.g., overtime, missed breaks, and unscheduled absences) and flags them for review. Integrate seamlessly with leading payroll and HRIS systems.

Electronically communicate work assignments and display the information most critical to the task at hand.

Operators can see a sequenced list of Orders, Lots, or Serials to work on. To start a run, the Operator simply selects the next assignment from the screen and presses a button. When the Operator completes the operation, ShopVue automatically dispatches the Order to the next step in routing.

All the related documents that you’d normally find in a “Traveler Packet” are available on the Console screen. Operators always have the most current information—setup instructions, part drawings, videos, or other digital content—at their fingertips.

Key aspects of Quality Management are included within the module, including Inspection Plans, Material Review Board (MRB), and Call / Response.

Paperless Factory Dispatch helps to improve schedule adherence, increase quality metrics, quickly disposition non-conformances, create and process rework, decrease customer lead time, strengthen communications within the factory, minimize paper and spreadsheets, and eliminate keypunching.

Despite the time and effort required to manually collect factory machine data, results are often questionable. Consider a sudden machine breakdown. The operator’s priority is to fix the problem, not immediately log the event. Yet a policy of recording the downtime “later on a clipboard” is imperfect: employees can forget exact details, take guesses, or manipulate facts to hide process problems.

Similarly, capturing yield and scrap data can be challenging even for a well-trained, conscientious employee. There may be too many parts to count. Employees may mix up quantities they produced with parts other employees or another shift produced. Even reading counters and doing the math is not error-proof.

ShopVue’s Direct Machine Interface (DMI) directly addresses these problems by capturing the data automatically through an electronic interface to the machine’s controls. OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a communication standard that provides a uniform way to exchange data between machines, controllers, IoT devices, and monitoring applications. This secure and scalable standard is integrated into ShopVue and will connect your networked machines without costly programming. At frequent intervals, ShopVue polls the machines, storing key data in a machine journal. The DMI engine then processes the journal and updates related aspects of the program such as status, yield, and quality.

Critical machine metrics like OEE, Utilization, and Machine Efficiency become a standard by which you can manage and measure the factory.

ShopVue can support tracking production lots or serial numbers through the manufacturing process. When product liability, public safety, and recallability are concerns, ShopVue enables manufacturers to maintain accurate traceability and complete product genealogy.

With ShopVue Production Traceability, you can: split orders into uniquely identified Packaging Lots (such as batches, rolls, or containers) at any point along the route.

Additionally, you can birth Serial numbers at any point during the production process to help ensure each Lot or Serial remains distinct in subsequent operations.

ShopVue MES allows you to create ad hoc collections (such as parts of whole orders or groups of serial numbers) and process them together as a unique Process Lot. This is often useful in operations such as heat-treating or coating.

Lastly, you can associate key attributes about the components and sub-assemblies with the top-level finished goods, and store and report on as-built data.

ShopVue’s Digital Instructions module brings the ERP routing down to a more granular level with Sub-Operations that are maintained within the MES or PLM. Operators are presented with a step-wise GUI embedded in the same Operator Console they use to report labor and quantities. Prompting the Operator with the next sequential task helps ensure the build plan was followed as the engineer intended.

With Digital Instructions, you can enforce sequential tasks within a process, prompt for Material Issue or Inspection Results, capture electronic stamps or sign-offs, manage revisions, implement a controlled process for creating, editing, and releasing build plans, help ensure the novice employee is doing quality work, and accelerate on-the-job training.

Gain access to all the data you need to run a smooth shop. Visualize KPIs like On-Time Delivery (OTD), Overall Line Efficiency (OLE), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and Work In Progress (WIP) as it happens to leverage key insights for continuous improvement.

Leverage APIs and APIs to construct and execute a seamless communication infrastructure, linking critical touch points across all your business systems for a real-time view of manufacturing operations.