Beacon-Trak™

Innovation and technology have united again, this time coming to the aid of shop floor managers. Manufacturing has gotten to the point where there is so much happening on the shop floor at any point in time that it is almost humanly impossible to keep up with the detail. At many companies, supervisors have become highly paid expeditors. They don’t have enough opportunities to use their experience and wisdom to work closely with associates in order to increase production, improve quality and lower costs. They spend their days trying to cope as best they can with the daily onslaught of change.

The greatest issue to overcome is to manage the use of information. There is either too much, or it is outdated at the moment it is needed. The solution has arrived and it comes from the innovation built into a 3” x 3” Bluetooth beacon and a tablet computer. By arranging beacons throughout your shop floor, Lake Companies’ newest and most innovative product in its 35+ year history will leverage a tablet computer to put instant, dynamic information in the hands of shop floor supervisors to help them win the battle of managing their work, quality, staff and equipment.

Beacon-Trak™ for Infor SyteLine is a patent-pending product that brings relevant, proximity-based information to a supervisor as they walk the shop floor and interact with their associates. Walk in the area of the brake presses, or the CNC routers, or CNC milling machines, etc. and Beacon-Trak will quickly show you the work centers in the area, as well as the associates working them and the jobs they are working on…all without searching for the information. Beacon-Trak automatically filters the information for you in order to provide real-time feedback on utilization, efficiency, quality, status information and more, with a simple touch screen interface.

Beacon-Trak fills the void between back-office ERP planning systems and shop floor Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), by bringing the data from both together to provide contextual information that will power better decisions and more collaboration on the shop floor. No more running back to the office in order to look up information or sort through stacks of reports. Respond instantly by having the right information at the ready, when you need it.

Beacon-Trak integrates with SyteLine as well as all of Lake Companies products, including Shop-Trak™, Doc-Trak™ and Fact-Trak™. The result is a paperless, real-time, proximity-based solution that allows supervisors to have just the information they need at their fingertips at the right time and the right place.

Production Management — Be aware of what is happening on the shop floor at the moment

• Puts the Shop-Trak Mobile Supervisor™ capability on steroids with proximity-based information
• What jobs are in process and the status of those jobs
• Beacon enabled dashboards containing efficiency, first pass yield, utilization and late jobs
• Who is working on what work, for how long and how many pieces they should have produced
• Seven day running charts to compare individual, departmental and work center performance

Quick Links — Provides supervisors with specific details without searching

• Find more detail regarding the person, job, work center, customer order and more
• Check detailed job status
• Access instant analytics to observe trends; slice and dice information
• View quality information, reject rates, efficiency details and more

Real-Time Dashboard — Up-to-the-moment information on your team:

• Know who on your team is here and who is not, whether they are absent, sick or taking time off
• Take a virtual walk around the shop floor by selecting the beacons from a map of your shop floor
• Manage conference room meeting discussions by knowing what is happening in real-time
• Put the dashboard into roaming mode and walk the shop floor, or shut it off and see everything

Role Based Roadmap — Leverage one set of beacons to assist multiple roles:

• Quality
• Setup
• Human Resources
• Cost Accounting
• Machine Maintenance
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
• Executive Management
• Planning/Scheduling
• Customer Service
• Inventory Management

To learn more about what Beacon-Trak can do for your business…  Request more information »