The new capabilities will add incremental insight into data and streamline problem solving.
Berkeley, CA, August 16, 2017 – VIMANA is enabling operators to share insights, communicate, and collaborate with their teams by introducing new Operator Panel and Tickets solutions. The new Operator Panel and Tickets solutions are included as part of VIMANA Elevate – Enterprise Edition software. The products had a roll-out to select customers for testing earlier this year, and are being released to all users officially today.
As technology evolves, more and more manufacturing facilities are discovering the benefits of ticketing and team-based notifications to satisfy their internal plant needs. The new Tickets solution will enable integrated shop floor communications from machine operators on downtimes, parts, tools, and issues. The machine operator will see many advantages of the ticketing systems capabilities as it will enable ease of communication with other team members. The operator will no longer have to call around, fill out paper forms, or try to find someone in the plant by walking around. They will simply be able to log an issue or request within the ticketing system, and the appropriate team member will receive it and be able to respond or deal with the issue or request quickly. This, in turn, will increase both operator and machine productivity and efficiency and overall plant capacity since incidents will be resolved faster.
“By providing a centralized messaging and communications area, operators will be able to quickly act on alerts, alarms, and faults to proactively act on potential issues,” stated Dr. Athulan Vijayaraghavan, co-founder and CTO of VIMANA. He added “we deployed this to a small group of customers during our soft-launch and have seen rapid adoption in their plants. One customer specifically, with a large manufacturing operation, had logged over 150 tickets in their first two weeks. Feedback from them has been very positive on the new Tickets feature and they have already seen a decrease in unplanned and planned downtime since the operators and machines needs are being met more quickly. They have also been able to move away from paper logs making the company greener.”
The Tickets feature is not only for logging machine issues. It can also be used to proactively address an issue and request a remedy, or to request more material or consumables to keep the machine producing with limited downtime.
The new Operator Panel offers an entire suite of new capabilities – machine classifications (downtime, set-up time, etc.), team-based notifications, comment tracking, and internal communications. These new capabilities will improve operator efficiency and engagement therefore enabling overall machine, line, and plant efficiency by identifying the areas for process improvement. Plant managers can now have a deeper level of insight into the machine’s state providing them with the information they need for better root cause analysis to make better decisions and solve problems with complete information in hand.
