Shop floor technicians and operators involved in assembly and other processes are at the critical, final steps in the manufacturing process. Unfortunately, these workers are often at the mercy of out of date, less than accurate paper documentation, or they need to access multiple systems to find associated parts information. These issues create bottlenecks that can impact quality and on time shipments, as well as lead to employee frustration. The following is a summary of the problems Fishbowl Solutions has seen at customers when it comes to accessing parts information needed for assembly:
  • Having the design engineers create manufacturing documentation, print it, and deliver physical copies to shop floor workers
  • Storing associated parts information on a network drive, making it hard to find for shop floor staff but especially new workers
  • Quality alerts and other processes are not integral with any systems
  • Parts information contained within PDFs requires excessive scrolling to get to the information needed
  • The MPMLink viewer requires multiple clicks to get to relevant parts information
To solve these problems, Fishbowl has worked with customers to leverage PTC ThingWorx to build shop floor viewing applications that can surface up relevant information to workers in one, simple view. To read the rest of this blog post and see sample screenshots of the shop floor viewing application, please click over to the PTC LiveWorx 2019 blog.