Material Flow Project

Problem: Limited material visibility and communication between support staff and assembly line personnel. Material requests were communicated via radio calls or written down on paper. Unfulfilled requests were not visible between shifts and no way to pass information along.

Solution: I created a program in Ignition for the requesting of material between support staff and the assembly lines. This information was logged and would not disappear between shifts. All requests once picked, were cleared from the screen but stored in a database for review if needed.

Overall: A decrease in time between request and fulfillment, an increase in operator efficiency, improved communication among team members and shifts, increased visibility on material flow and operator performance, operators could easily switch support areas, and training new team members became easier and more streamlined

The program was created in Inductive Automation’s Ignition SCADA software using Python and SQL programming. Python was used for screen and function development. SQL was used to execute commands on custom databases where all request information was recorded. SQL was also used to read and pull information from the company’s ERP system.