The client is a top company with a 30-year experience in providing manufacturers with the right data for monitoring their product lines. The company offers a broad variety of tools combined in the manufacturing execution systems (MES) cluster.
MES software helps manufacturers:
improve the availability of data
decrease machine downtime
lower costs
improve decision making
reduce paperwork burden
CodeIT's input has helped the client to incorporate new technologies and develop new software from scratch. Learn more about the task and software development process below.
02
Our task
The CodeIT team was involved in the project as an experienced tech vendor. Our team was assigned to create a new machine uptime monitoring tool and connect it with the existing manufacturing execution system.
Our team was requested to develop new software to help:
Monitor the current program of machines
Analyze data and generate charts
Present relevant information on a dashboard
Prepare reports automatically
Check and configure system permissions
Hire CodeIT to develop custom product line management software
03
Implementation
CodeIT has decomposed the machine uptime monitoring software development process into six stages and defined outcomes for each.
1. Analysis and technology selection
We’ve thoroughly analyzed project requirements received from the client to understand the problems it should solve and define the scope of work. Also, our team has examined the existing manufacturing execution system to pick the right technologies for implementing new software.
2. Product development planning
The CodeIT team has decomposed the machine uptime monitoring software development task. We’ve created a backlog of tasks, defined outcomes, and identified risks to tackle. The detailed plan enabled consistent and bottleneck-free software development.
3. Team onboarding
We've onboarded a team of tech experts with the required skills to implement the requested solution. CodeIT has identified roles and responsibilities, created a communication plan, and defined tools.
4. Solution development
The CodeIT team has created front-end and back-end machine uptime monitoring applications. We’ve also created a database and configured an Apache server. The foremost components developed by our team are the following.
Dashboard
A web app that provides access to relevant information about product line machines, including the following:
machine uptime
product quality
shop floor productivity
job summary
material usage
All the data is gathered, analyzed in live time. Users can create custom dashboards by rearranging the order of displayed information to access the most relevant information first.
Data visualization
The system analyzes and transforms all the data received from machines to make it easy to consume for end users. The developed system automatically generates charts and updates them in live time once new data from machines is received.
Reports generation
The machine uptime monitoring software enables the opportunity to generate reports to track the changes in crucial metrics. Users can generate reports for defined periods or enable automatic report generation following a custom schedule.
The rich functionality of the report generation tool foresees the opportunity for users to generate different types of reports containing various information automatically.
Machine status viewer
Users can explore the list of machines in a product line and check whether they are active. Also, they can check the current program of a machine by clicking on it in the list.
Besides, users can end/suspend the current program of a machine or enable the next program in a queue by clicking a button.
System permission configuration
The machine uptime monitoring software users have different permissions that the admin users assign. The permission configuration setting enables the opportunity to limit functionality and data access for defined users. Users who need access to restricted data or functionality can submit requests to the admin user for further approval.
Need to build new software with a unique feature set?
5. Testing and optimization
Our quality assurance (QA) specialist has executed manual and automated tests. All the information about detected bugs, app performance, and possible security issues had been documented and passed to the software engineering team.
Also, we have optimized the developed solution by minifying the CSS and JavaScript code using Grunt, a tool used to perform frequent tasks automatically. The minification has helped our team increase the system's performance by reducing the size of files and bandwidth usage.
6. Software integration
The tested and optimized machine uptime monitoring software had been integrated into the existing manufacturing execution system. Besides, we’ve tested the integration to ensure the software works error-free.
04
Result
The CodeIT team has analyzed the existing software, picked the right technologies, composed a product development plan, and created a new machine uptime monitoring software. Also, we have connected the new software with the existing manufacturing execution system to enrich its functionality.
The machine uptime monitoring software developed by our team has helped increase machine management efficiency by 30%.
Our team
Business Analysis
Project manager
Back-end developer
Front-end developer
QA engineer
Technology stack
Front-end: HTML, SCSS, JavaScript, jQuery
Back-end: Python, Django framework
Database: PostgreSQL
Server: Apache
Need help with your project? Contact our developers' team!
