The shop-floor terminals, explained

A plain-language tour of what Workcell's kiosk terminals are and how the floor's work feeds the same records the office sees.

Most of Workcell is the full app: a desk surface with menus, search, and every record a few clicks away. That is the wrong tool for someone standing at a machine with gloves on. The terminals are the other half. They are stripped-down, full-screen kiosks built for people doing one physical job, fast and repeatedly, often on a shared or wall-mounted screen. This primer explains what the terminals are and how they fit together; the how-to docs cover the taps.

One job per screen

A terminal is not a smaller copy of the app. It is a focused window onto one task, with big touch targets and a number pad instead of menus and forms. There are three, and the right one depends on what the person at that station actually does.

The operator terminal

The operator terminal is where a machine operator reports work. It runs signed in as the operator's own account and reads the live list of operations on released and in-progress work orders, so the operator can pick up the next job and start their labor against it without leaving the floor. Start a job, end it, switch to another, clock out: that is the whole loop. Use this where one person owns a station for the shift.

The time clock

The time clock is the shared kiosk a whole crew passes. Nobody is signed in; each person enters their employee number on the number pad, then punches in or out. While clocked in, they can change which job their labor is logged against, or sit on indirect labor with no job at all. The terminal confirms each punch and resets for the next person, so it is safe to leave running unattended on a wall.

The warehouse terminal

The warehouse terminal is the floor view for moving stock. It groups the day's work into five tabs (Receive, Pick, Transfer, Count, and Ship) so warehouse staff can receive incoming items, pick and ship orders, move stock between locations, and count what is on hand, all without the desktop UI. Every tab acts on the same warehouse and inventory records the desk screens use.

What ties them together

The terminals look different and serve different people, but they share one idea: a terminal holds no records of its own. It is a focused front end onto records that other modules own. What an operator reports flows into Production and Workforce. Every punch at the time clock becomes a time record in Workforce. Every move at the warehouse terminal posts to Inventory and Warehouse.

That is the point. Because the floor and the desk act on the same live records, anything reported at a kiosk appears immediately on the office screens, and the reverse. There is no batch, no sync, no separate floor database to reconcile. The operator who starts a job and the planner watching production are looking at one record from two surfaces.

Why kiosks instead of the full app

The work on the floor is physical, repetitive, and time-sensitive. Forcing it through the full app would mean navigation no one has hands free for and screens cluttered with records that do not matter at that station. Splitting the floor into purpose-built kiosks keeps each person on task and keeps a shared device from wandering, while still writing straight into the same source of truth the rest of Workcell reads.

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