FACTIVITY is pleased to announce its MES product, sold under the name Shop Floor Workbench, is increasingly being installed by manufacturing facilities internationally.

“We now have several operations in countries outside the US and an increasing number of companies are asking about implementation in their non-US based operations,” said John Leibert, President of FACTIVITY.

International companies have found success using Shop Floor Workbench in a variety of manufacturing applications.

· In Belgium, Shop Floor Workbench is being used in a facility that produces high performance seal and gaskets used in race cars and other tight tolerance applications. 

· The company’s German installation produces unique plastic extrusions with special additives for industrial and commercial products. 

· In the UK, FACTIVITY software is used in a facility that makes high tolerance metal rings.  These rings range in size and are produced from stamping.  The smallest are used in PC hard drive applications.  

· In both Korea and Poland, there are multiple metal fabrication lines where once the machine is set-up, the asset produces quality parts automatically without operation intervention.  Automatic accounting of production is accomplished using the FACTIVITY Shop Floor Workbench with its add-on Module Machine Monitoring.  This allows one operator to oversee two or more machines simultaneously.  The FACTIVITY MES product not only tracks the production against the rated machine cycle time but also provides actual run time (up time) versus down time (availability) on each machine that it monitors.

“In Korea, they have an area where 12 machines are monitored by just a handful of employees,” Leibert said.  “The use of the FACTIVITY Multi-POD interface allows the operator to easily connect the jobs to the machines to the part.”

FACTIVITY software records counts automatically and allows the operator to produce labels on demand where and when required.  Reporting scrap with pre-determined reason codes is built into the unique operator user interface (UI).  Together, the paperless shop floor control and data collection and acquisition systems allow for quick calculation of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), along with labor time accounting;  Not only in real-time but in back-end performance Metrics.  Just as important is the seamless integration to the enterprise system for up-to-the-minute recording of all floor activity. 

“While most International sites were implemented and able to go live with the FACTIVITY system in 45-60 days, the summer months presented some delays,” Leibert said.   “In some cases, we expanded to 120 days to insure that everyone was back from summer vacations to be trained and ready for the go-live.”