Plant Managers
Output, on-time delivery, labor cost, and scrap on one page, built from what the floor actually recorded today.
Whether the floor is running to plan right now, and what to move when it is not.
A plant manager's week is a sequence of reviews, and every one of them starts with the same question: is the number in front of me real. What shipped, what slipped, which work centers ran and which sat idle, whether the hours burned on open jobs still fit the price that was quoted. In most plants those four answers live in four places and reconciling them is somebody's whole afternoon. WorkCell posts them as the work happens. Operators clock on at a terminal and record quantity, scrap, and time, every posting carries the job it belongs to, and the figures on your dashboard are the same figures the month closes with. Nothing is retyped, so nothing diverges.
Somebody spends an hour before the meeting pulling hours off time cards, counts off the whiteboard, and shipments out of the accounting system. Then the first fifteen minutes of the meeting are spent arguing about whether the sheet is right, which is fifteen minutes not spent deciding what to move.
Material has been issued, labor has been burned, and outside processing has been invoiced, but none of it is attached to a job anyone can total. The number you give the owner on Friday and the number the controller books at month end are both defensible and both different, and the gap gets explained rather than closed. Nobody is wrong, which is worse than somebody being wrong, because there is nothing to correct.
By the time a closed job gets costed, the run is gone, the operator has forgotten it, and the quote for the repeat order has already been sent at the old price. You learn what a part costs exactly one cycle too late to do anything about it.
The plan assumed the machine would be free and the material would be there. Neither held, and because nothing recalculated, the promise stayed on the acknowledgement until the buyer called. Nobody inside the plant was lying; the schedule simply never told anyone it had moved.
Saturday is authorized to pull a late job in, but the hours land in payroll rather than against the job, so the cost of recovery never shows up next to the job that caused it. The same recovery gets authorized again three weeks later.
Reports built on live postings
Dashboards and reports read the same rows the floor created minutes ago: clock-ons, completions, scrap, receipts, shipments. There is no overnight batch and no export step, so the number on your screen at ten in the morning is the number, not a copy of one.
A job cost object on every posting
Labor, material, scrap, and outside processing are all stamped with the job they belong to as they post. Work in process stops being an estimate, and the question of what a job has consumed so far has one answer rather than one per person asked.
Estimate against actual on the job
The hours and material the estimator priced sit next to what the job actually consumed, operation by operation. Variance shows up while the job is open, which is the only point at which anyone can still act on it.
Finite capacity scheduling you can test first
The scheduler plans against real machine and labor capacity rather than infinite capacity, and a proposal run lets a planner try a sequence and see which deliveries move before committing it. Recovery plans get evaluated instead of guessed at.
Shop floor terminals at the machine
Operators clock on to an operation, record quantities and scrap, and enter inspection results where the work is happening. The production record and the cost record are the same entry, so the floor is not doing paperwork twice to feed your reports.
Scrap and nonconformance against the job that caused it
Scrap is recorded at the operation, and a failed inspection raises a severity-classified nonconformance attached to the job. The cost of poor quality stops being a line in the month-end variance and starts being a list of specific jobs, parts, and operations you can act on this week.
| Task | What Changes |
|---|---|
| Name your three numbers | Pick the three figures you will be judged on this quarter, usually shipped value, on-time delivery, and hours against quoted hours. Everything else on the dashboard is context. Deciding this first stops the rollout from becoming a request for every report anyone has ever wanted. |
| Put a terminal in front of the machines | Operators clock on and record quantity, scrap, and time at the operation. This is the one change that has to hold, because every number you want afterwards is assembled from these postings. Start with one cell and expand once the clock-ons look honest. |
| Open one closed job and read it | Take a job that finished last month and compare the estimate to what posted against it. You will usually find one operation carrying the whole variance. That single comparison tells you more about your standards than a quarter of summary reporting. |
| Run next week as a proposal | Load the schedule against real capacity and run it as a proposal before anyone commits to it. You see which deliveries the current backlog actually supports, which is normally the first time the plan and the promise have been compared directly. |
| Move the weekly review onto the dashboard | Hold the review against the live screens rather than a printed pack. The meeting stops being a debate about data provenance, and the hour someone spent preparing the pack goes back into the plant. |
Dashboards and reports reading live postings rather than an overnight extract.
ProductionFinite scheduling and operator terminals that record what actually ran.
AccountingJob costing posted as work happens, with QuickBooks Online for the ledger.
WorkforceWho clocked on to which operation, and for how long.
The person holding the schedule you are reviewing every morning.
ControllersWhere your work in process number has to agree with the ledger.
Job ShopsHigh-mix, low-volume plants where no two weeks load the same way.
AnalyticsThe reports and dashboards the daily and weekly reviews run on.
What should I actually be looking at for shop floor analytics?
Start with shipped value, on-time delivery against promise, and actual hours against quoted hours by work center. Those three cover output, the customer, and margin. WorkCell builds them from operator clock-ons and completions, so they update as the shift runs rather than being assembled on Monday.
How many shops actually track actual hours against the bid price?
Far fewer than claim to, because it requires time collected at the operation rather than on a weekly card. WorkCell posts labor to the job as operators clock on, then shows estimate against actual per operation, so the comparison exists without anybody reconciling two systems by hand.
Can I tell whether the floor is running to plan right now?
Yes. Open jobs show which operation they are sitting at, who is clocked on, and what has been completed or scrapped so far. The picture comes from the terminals on the floor, so it is current to the last transaction rather than to the last status meeting.
Can I see what a broken machine does to my delivery dates before I promise anything?
Finite capacity scheduling plans against real machine and labor capacity, and a proposal run lets you take the machine out, resequence, and see which jobs move before you commit the plan. You give the customer a date the schedule supports instead of a hopeful one.
Does WorkCell give me OEE?
Not as a packaged dashboard, and it does not read machine signals: there is no MTConnect or OPC-UA capture today. What you get is operator-recorded run time, quantities, and scrap against each operation, which answers utilization and yield questions but is not a substitute for a dedicated monitoring system.
What does it take to stop my month end producing surprises?
Mostly it takes labor and material landing on the job as they are consumed rather than being allocated afterwards. WorkCell stamps every posting with a job cost object, so work in process is a sum of real transactions and the close reconciles to what you already reported during the month.
See it from your seat.
Tell us the three numbers you get asked for every week and we will show you where each one comes from.