Manufacturers & plant operators
Most plants already own capable equipment from several vendors, each with its own controller, fleet manager and screen. What is missing is the layer above them that plans the whole floor at once — this is software for that layer, and it leaves the equipment and its safety exactly where they are.
Six problems
Each of these goes wrong on a floor full of capable machines, for reasons that have nothing to do with the machines — and each is answered by a rule rather than by a feature.
Each fleet manager optimises its own robots and none of them can see the others. Here every vendor reports into one record through its own interface, and one allocator hands work across vendor boundaries — including the shared lift or charger none of them knew the others were using.
It assumed material that had not arrived, a cell booked for maintenance or a robot that faulted overnight. A schedule here is planned against the live state of all three, and one that depends on something missing is refused naming what it needed — before the shift, not during it.
Predictions are built from the condition signals your systems already emit, each shown with the evidence behind it, and maintenance windows are booked into the production plan so a robot in service is never scheduled for work.
A fleet that charges at shift change and two lines starting together set next month’s demand charge. Schedules here are checked against the contracted demand limit and the tariff on the day before release, and only work a planner marked as flexible is ever moved.
Waiting time is attributed to its cause — a resource another robot held, a handover, material, a fault — because every assignment and every wait is recorded with its reason rather than inferred from a utilisation chart afterwards.
The constraining operation is identified from measured cycle times, waits and stoppages rather than from nominal rates, and every figure on the report can be walked back to the events that produced it.
An order, end to end
A manufacturing order arrives from your ERP or is entered here, with its routing, quantity and due date — none of them defaulted, because the routing decides which cells and robots the work needs.
The order is scheduled against capacity, material on hand, maintenance windows, the robot fleet and the energy limit at once. Anything the plan depends on that is not there is named, and the plan is refused until it is.
The plan runs against your own layout in simulation — throughput, conflicts, energy draw — and a named plant lead reviews it and releases it. Nothing reaches the floor unreleased.
Tasks go to each robot through its vendor’s controller or fleet manager, which executes them under its own safety logic and may refuse. Faults and refusals are replanned inside the released plan, in the open.
Completed, scrapped and reworked quantities reconcile to what started; throughput, waits and energy are reported against the plan that was released, with every figure traceable to its events.
The number that matters
The comparison a plant is actually run on, with the reason for every difference recorded rather than reconstructed.
What we assume
Your robots keep their controllers, safety systems and fleet managers; your PLCs keep their programs; your ERP, MES and SCADA can keep running. This line reads from them through adapters and sends tasks only through the interfaces vendors provide for exactly that. If the only thing you ever use is cross-vendor fleet coordination, that is a reasonable way to use it.
Which robots waited, what the schedule assumed, and what the energy bill did that week. That conversation is more useful than any demonstration we could prepare in advance.
Get in touch
No chatbot and no ticket queue. Tell us what your floor actually looks like — the robots and who supplies them, the systems they already report to, and what you would like coordinated first — and someone who works on the software will reply.
info@legosphere.com