For plants that build the shift report by hand
The report that builds itself from the machines.
Vectis Works connects your PLCs, HMIs, Kepware or OPC server and the spreadsheets around them into a live plant dashboard. The shift and weekly numbers fill in on their own, read straight from the floor.
Today
- Walk the lines and write down the counters.
- Collect the downtime sheets from each work center.
- Ask around for the stops nobody wrote down.
- Type it all into last week's spreadsheet.
- Fix the formula that broke since then.
- Send the file before the morning meeting.
With a live dashboard
1. Open the screen.
Counts, run rates and stops are already there, read from the controls and kept by shift and by week.
- Machine status for every line and work center
- Each stop logged once, with its reason
- The weekly view, already totaled
The manual report
Where the hours go
Most plants are not short of numbers. The PLCs count every cycle. The HMI shows every stop. Kepware or an OPC server already carries the tags. The trouble is that none of it lands in the report on its own.
So a person does it. A supervisor copies counters at the end of the shift, an engineer chases the reasons behind the stops, and someone in the office stitches it into a spreadsheet only they fully understand. The report shows up after the shift it describes, and it is only as good as what got written down.
Those hours come out of the people who should be on the floor. We hand that work to the machines.
The dashboard
What's on the screen before the shift starts
The numbers your report already asks for, kept current by the controls and ready by shift, day and week. We start with the few that matter most to your plant, not a wall of numbers.
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Machine status
Running, idle or down, for every line and work center, as it changes.
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Part counts
Good and total parts by machine, shift and part number.
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Run rates
Actual rate against the ideal, so slow running shows up during the shift, not after it.
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Uptime and downtime
Every stop with its length and a reason, so the downtime column fills itself in.
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Scrap
Rejects by machine and cause, where the controls or quality records hold that data.
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OEE and trends
Availability, performance and quality, with the trend across days and weeks.
A plain word on OEE. The machines supply the counts and the stops. Two inputs rarely live in the controls at all: the shift calendar, and the ideal cycle time for each part. Those normally sit in your ERP or your standards, and we wire them in rather than guess.
The work
How we get there
Three stages, with your own people checking the numbers along the way.
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Start from your report
We sit down with the person who builds it today, go through the spreadsheet line by line, and trace each number back to a machine, a tag or a sheet.
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Connect read-only
We hook into the PLCs, HMIs, Kepware or OPC server on a read-only link that can't send anything back, tidy the tags, and bring in shift calendars and ideal cycle times.
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Put it on the screen
The report's numbers go live on a dashboard your supervisors use. Your team checks them against the floor, then we add the next line.
Capabilities
More than the report
Once the data flows, the work around the report gets lighter too.
One team covers the whole job: PLCs and controls, Allen-Bradley among them; how the data is modeled and joined up; the back end and the front end; and advice on your ERP. We have spent 20+ years putting systems to work in operations-heavy businesses.
- Spreadsheet workflows rebuilt as governed web apps, with an audit trail, permissions and rules you approve before anything is rebuilt
- Workflow automation and integrations between the systems you already run
- One organized home for plant data, with APIs other tools can pull the same numbers from
- Reporting that assembles itself, well past the shift report
- Custom internal tools for the people who run the floor
- Ongoing support, when you want it
Ownership
You keep all of it
The connection only reads. There is no write path from the dashboard to a PLC, a setpoint or a recipe, and your IT and controls people can check that for themselves. Everything we build runs inside your environment, and you own it outright: every line of code, the data it gathers, and the systems it runs on. If you want help once it is running, ongoing support is there as an option, not a licence.
Bring us the report you build by hand.
Tell us what goes into it and where each number comes from today. We'll say plainly which parts the machines can fill in, and whether we're the right fit.