Industrial Real Time Reporting

The Problem

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Prinovis were already using sophisticated manufacturing systems with real-time shop floor data collection but they had no way of evaluating the balance of speed, waste and uptime on the production line; dynamic visibility was required.

The pressure of working in an internationally competitive market puts a constant demand upon management to report and reflect the changing business priorities.

Village was already supporting a number of Enterprise Integration projects and Business Intelligence and Reporting projects at Prinovis and was appointed to deliver the solution.

Prinovis UK utilised the Technique MIS system from EFI to manage their printing operation across the printing and finishing operations. While these systems provide sources for current state and end of shift reporting they did not provide minute by minute capabilities that were required. Machine operators and the wider operations team needed a facility to show how a shift is going and how a shift went. To complement the array of shift summary sources that they have.

The Solution

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It was determined to develop a live dashboard and Village had to identify and secure the minute by minute changes in the data of the production systems using .NET technologies. Once secured this data was imported into a SQL database. The data was then made available to a customised dashboard system that provided a live graph of the last half a day production of a specific or group of machines. 

The people on the shop floor referred to this system as BDE in reference to the German Acronym for a similar capability working on a different system in a sister factory.

Additional functionality was delivered providing the ability to deliver a passive system allowing a screen to be configured for one of or a group of systems. This system has an interactive mode allowing the zooming in and out of details from the previous weeks and creating images for reports and discussions.

On other occasions we delivered BI systems withing Prinovis using Microsoft SSRS or in more recent times PowerBI but on this occasion a more operational portal was required, so we used a web development approach to show the graphs. 

For good reasons the EFI Technique system did not manage on a minute by minute basis, so we had to extract the data in real time from the system to give the background data to power this portal and other statistics inside the system.

Manufacturing companies often have a 15 year history of systems running on the factory floor, a certain length and depth of experience is needed to extract the relevant data from the variety of systems from several technical generations.