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The latest tool in the frontline suite is officially live: Tendrel Runtime. Runtime enables you to create minute-by-minute logs of manufacturing processes, highlighting downtime and output. Using Runtime, you can better understand the productivity of these processes and the common root causes of downtime.
Born to Run
Runtime was inspired by the problems we've heard working with small manufacturers. These customers struggle to get real-time visibility into the status of their manufacturing processes. When a line goes down, it may take a while to remediate.
Even teams working in highly automated facilities often have these same problems. We've seen teams with access to real-time machine data that still rely on pen and paper for tracking downtime. The machine data is either too hard to access or too esoteric to be useful.
Without visibility, when a problem occurs, unscheduled maintenance and repairs can take longer than needed. This is valuable manufacturing time that gets lost, which impacts their bottom line.
Performing any sort of downtime analysis is also slow and labor intensive for these teams. Because valuable data is stuck on paper, they spend hours manually transcribing data into spreadsheets to perform analysis.
There are tools out there that solve similar problems, but they're large, expensive, and unwieldy. Runtime is designed for customers that are too small or strapped for time to deploy something like Redzone. Our solution is cheap, lightweight, and provides instant results.
While we haven't proven it, we expect Runtime works great in other environments. It could be used to calculate piece rate in a greenhouse or time spent packing a specific customer in warehouse - really anywhere you need to measure a productive rate over time.
How Runtime Works
To get started on Runtime, you'll first set up your locations via the Tendrel console. These locations can represent any portion of your facility you want to track - from an individual machine to an entire production line or room.
When you open the Runtime app, you'll start on the list of locations you set up.
Select a location, and when production starts click "Start Run." This will begin tracking.From there, Runtime basically works like a stopwatch. When the line is down, select the appropriate button to start tracking downtime. When downtime is over, you can record additional information like notes and photos on what went wrong.
When production is over, you can end the run. At this point you can record the output of the run. If you don't know it right now, that's fine - you can update it later.
On both the Tendrel app and web console, the list of locations doubles a real-time status dashboard. Once you're tracking, you can see the status of each location in the list.
You can also access your history and view specific production runs on both the app and console to get a full breakdown of how time was spent.
Try it out!
Runtime is available now - you can get sign up on the Tendrel console and download it on the app stores. It's bundled with the rest of the frontline suite at $30 a month.
We have plenty of upcoming features planned including improved downtime analysis, more dashboards, batch tracking, and more. Stay tuned!
