How to display a work schedule on a shop floor monitor?

[David]

I'm trying to find a way to display a work schedule with job, machine, employee, planned time and actual time on a shop floor monitor so employees can see where jobs are on the schedule. This is also so employees who are notoriously slow will have their slowness displayed for all to see.

Any suggestions for how to do this? Our IT guy is too swamped to help and internet searches are too vague. Ideally we'd like something that constantly displays a spreadsheet or similar that we update and store on a network drive.

[id10t]

Big screen TV, a Raspberry Pi, and ?????

The ???? part will depend on what format your schedule is in and what formats it can be exported in, etc. If you can give me some more ideas on how exactly your scheduling system works, I can come up with ideas, and possibly code

[VincentVega]

How are you updating the tasks/schedule? Manual check in/out process? Seems like it could be a lot of overhead if not automated. You could use a trouble ticket system, assign a ticket/job to someone with a due date/time.

Or maybe just a simple timer on the roof of a car, it goes off or blinks when times up. Bring the clock back with time left and get a perk. Still not automated but simple.

[dad911]

Chromecast. Plug into monitor HDMI port. Bring up a spreadsheet (google docs) using chrome as browser, then rightclick, cast.

Done over wi-fi.

easy-peasy.

[John Rogers]

I would spend a few dollars to bring in an "audio-visual" installer expert. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered such as: what is your company doing so will a flat screen pose a threat if it gets hit by machinery? What software do you run that tracks everything and how often is the data updated such as by a bar code or badge swipe? Does your software have a screen that already displays a status of the various jobs and how they are with their schedule. Can this software do updates automatically say every 15 minutes and refresh the display? If you can connect the flat screen via hard wire it is a tad safer than using wireless so no one will steal the signal and use it against your company. Finally is you have employee(s) that habitual poor or late performers putting this out on the shop floor might make one "snap" and put a couple bullet holes in the monitor and possibly some employees, including you! People have gone nuts for far less as shown on the news these days.

[David]

We use SAP for work orders and Primavera for scheduling but I don't want that much detail.

I'm thinking a simple Excel spreadsheet that we update during our morning production meeting. Then display that on a couple of monitors on the shop floor.

[David]

Originally Posted by dad911

Chromecast. Plug into monitor HDMI port. Bring up a spreadsheet (google docs) using chrome as browser, then rightclick, cast.

Done over wi-fi.

easy-peasy.

This sounds like what we're looking for. Is this correct: The chromecast device would be connected to our wi-fi and then I guess it has an IP address or something we send a picture of the spreadsheet to?

[VincentVega]

If chromecast is on the wifi network it will have an ip. Spreadsheet works but thats a lot of manual interaction. Are you manually tracking everything and just reporting in a spreadsheet?

Interesting idea. I'm thinking back to the overhead screen when I worked fast food.

[vash]

go cheap. buy a sweatshirt with a big red "A" sewn on the front for the slowpoke to wear.

[John Rogers]

Someone that worked for McDonald's IT a few years ago told me the large screens were nothing more than slide shows that were updated or modified at a central office and generally any changes were pushed out at night. The little one that shows the "next number served" status was run off the cash register system which fed information to where stocks were updated. They kept tract of the number of customers so the customer # could be easily displayed. Since you use SAP it should have the ability to generate a "small" report since the ABAP language they use can do lots of stuff or at least when I worked with it in the early 2000's it could. At the shipyard in San Diego SAP was scheduled to put out a "status" report every 4 hours since the shipyard ran 3 shifts most of the time. The time for the report could also be set within SAP.

[David]

Originally Posted by vash

go cheap. buy a sweatshirt with a big red "A" sewn on the front for the slowpoke to wear.

It's a union shop so all our other ideas to get productivity up get shot down, but I could start a whole other thread on managing a union shop.

We have a production meeting every morning to go over all the jobs so it's not much more work to update a spreadsheet every morning. Plus a short and simple spreadsheet is easy enough for the machinists or customers to understand. Anything output from SAP or Primavera would be too confusing and too large to be useful.

[scottmandue]

+1 on Excel.

I'm not an expert but if the computer and Flat screen both have WIFI cant they just work together without chromecast?

What we do here for meetings is just plug a laptop into the flat screen with a HDMI cable.