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We here at FactoryWiz have assured our entire staff that throughout the current Covid-19 epidemic they can count on having a paycheck and healthcare for the long haul, even our field workers who are grounded from travel. For us this isn’t just an expense, it’s an investment in our future and part of our company’s moral responsibility to the families who depend on us. But it isn’t just our workers who depend on us being there for them, it’s also our customers. During these challenging times, we want you to know that FactoryWiz will do what we can to support you and your work force, so we all have a business to come back to next year and beyond.

Here are some real-world ways you can use the FactoryWiz system to keep your business running while observing government mandates for workforce distancing and telecommuting:

Bill for unattended time on automated work centers

Many of our customers find themselves operating with reduced staff either due to sick leave, distancing mandates, or other government restrictions. Applying scarce labor to keep automated machines running makes excellent economic sense, and wherever possible we want to see machines running 24/7. The problem many shops have is that an ERP system usually only tracks time when a person manually clocks in or out of a job. If a job runs on a cell in the middle of a batch – how do you track and bill for that time properly?

The answer is that many shops under-bill unattended time and lose out on that revenue. FactoryWiz can help you track the machine productivity of all your unattended assets to determine how long certain parts took and reference that back to work orders in your ERP system for proper job costing. Now isn’t the time to be giving that time away for free – let FactoryWiz help you track and bill for it properly.

Keep remote management in the loop

One of the more unusual effects of the current round of workplace precautions is that we have seen some shops tell older workers to work remotely out of concern for their health. Other times factories need to comply with government mandates that all eligible workers telecommute. Both of these things often lead to management disproportionately needing to work from home while still keeping track of what’s going on in the shop. With FactoryWiz, any web-enabled device has the ability to find out what’s happening on every machine and pull up the day’s actual production data. We can even push messages out to machine operators or factory dashboards.

Because your FactoryWiz system is web based, but owned by your company, we can work within your IT mandates. Some companies make the server accessible through the internet with a secure login. Other companies mandate a VPN or remote screen mirror connection to comply with ITAR or other government and industry requirements. Unlike a pure cloud solution, FactoryWiz uses web technology but puts you in control of where your data lives and who has access to it – because in the end we want to give you all of the tools you need to enable that management remote access.

Give a hand to workers who may be stretched thin

We are seeing sites where operators are heroically manning three, four, or even more machines while their coworkers are out on sick leave – helping to preserve production and keep the factory alive. Despite those amazing efforts, it just isn’t possible to be in front of every machine at once. FactoryWiz can help with dashboards in the shop to let operators monitor an entire cell of machines at once. FactoryWiz can send pages from tablet stations or based on pre-programmed events. Departments can communicate with each other so that an operator doesn’t need to waste time walking to the quality department to let them know a part is ready for inspection – the quality department will get the message on their dashboard right from the machine.

Let us help you

Right now, our 100% US-based technicians can’t fly to customer sites for new installations – but they’re set up at home and doing a great job installing as much as they can remotely for newer equipment. With a remote meeting to your server they will get FactoryWiz going right now when you need these tools the most.

But more importantly, let us invest in your future – because we want our customers to be healthy in 2020 and beyond. After the initial installation if you need custom dashboards made for your cells or a custom tablet interface made for some proprietary information you want to pass to your ERP system, our techs will use this down time to help you get those customizations made – on our dime.

Also, if you are in the USA we have flexible plans available so you can still make long-term beneficial investments during these challenging times. And if there is anything else we can do, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Our staff is here to help you.

Here’s looking forward to kicking this thing in the butt and getting back to business.

 

Rich Hefner
Vice-President, FactoryWiz