Prodsmart: Setting up the Smart Shop Floor

Gonçalo Fortes, CEO

Gonçalo Fortes, CEO of Prodsmart, an industry veteran in the manufacturing arena established his company with a vision to build a world of interconnected factories. As the world takes a leap towards the fourth industrial revolution, manufacturing companies continue to be saddled with traditional methods like spreadsheets and paper notes to collect data and track production on the shop floor. The limited visibility of the shop floor affects their efficiency, time-to-market, and productivity. Prodsmart’s groundbreaking manufacturing execution system (MES) replaces the paper-based data collection methods and renders the ultimate truth of the shop floor. The system integrated with mobility provides a holistic view of the entire value chain, from product development through production planning, engineering, and production execution to service.

Prodsmart’s MES solution enables client’s to efficiently garner details of raw material that was used or wasted, an operation carried out by a worker, information about single machine output and much more at a granular level. Prodsmart utilizes a plethora of mobile devices and sensors to collect production data from the shop floor. The devices include smartphones, tablets, NFC tags, barcode scanners, IoT sensors, machine integrations, and more. Prodsmart’s MES is integrated with IoT sensors to collect data from the production line and proactively analyzed to improve the decision-making capabilities. The MES can be custom setup to analyze any parameter of a product, from any specific production order, in real time. Especially, in the textile and apparel sector, organizations deal with a plethora of products of different sizes, colors, shapes, and materials every day. The system can decipher which colors are taking more time to be painted. “Our system collects all the operational data from the shop floor and makes it easily available for the management in real-time to make better decisions,” asserts Fortes.

Our system collects all the operational data from the shop floor and makes it easily available to the management in real-time

Unlike other MES and ERP solution providers, Prodsmart allows customers to try their product and helps them with the custom setup. “We implement the solution for a specific area of the shop floor in the trial period and customers can see for themselves how the system works and then opt our state-of-the-art system for complete shop floor operations,” states Fortes. Prodsmart’s system is built-in with a plethora of robust features that include quality control and scrap rates analysis, inventory management, planning and BOM management, and real-time routing adjustments according to the equipment availability.

By leveraging all the innovative features, Prodsmart has assisted various manufacturing companies across different industry segments to enhance inventory visibility and improve operational efficiencies by reducing waste, improving yield, and increasing on-time delivery. For instance, J3LP—a metalworks company that produces high-end products for fashion brands needed to understand their production line in real time. After experiencing several management and efficiency problems, they decided to partner with Prodsmart. With Prodsmart, J3PL created a production control room that enabled them to eliminate tasks related to traditional data collection methods and improved the shop floor efficiency by over 200 hours for key production management personnel. Furthermore, it allowed them to reduce 65 percent of the scrap made in production and delivery time by three days.

According to Fortes, the company is en route to provide a product that serves not just the production manager but also CFOs and the quality department. The plans on the anvil also include improved client-to-client and client-to-supplier communication. “Prodsmart looks forward to providing a better two-way communication channel or interface that offers a seamless way for factories to work together with full supply chain visibility,” concludes Fortes.