A kiosk instead of job cards: what changed on the floor

Before the deployment it worked like this: every morning somebody in the office printed the schedule for the day, distributed the sheets around the workstations, and in the evening collected them and re-typed the quantities into a spreadsheet. In between, nobody knew what stage a job was at — beyond whatever could be established by phone or by walking the floor.

What we changed

A tablet with a scanner now stands on the floor. Every operator got a badge with a code. The whole cycle is five steps:

1. scan the badge,
2. one BEGIN button,
3. work at the machine,
4. scan again,
5. DONE, or enter the scrap count.

The kiosk remembers who has an open task, so the second scan goes straight to asking for the result. On larger batches the operator enters only the scrap count — the number of good pieces is calculated automatically.

What went better than expected

Training. We budgeted an hour per person. In practice operators understood the idea after the first scan. The training deck turned out to be more useful for supervisors than for the people at the machines.

Badges. The worry that cards would get lost proved overblown. They work with work gloves on, which would be impossible with a touchscreen phone.

Operation sequence. The kiosk will not let a step start until the previous one is closed. We expected complaints; instead we got questions like “so who has this job now?” — and the answer is on the screen.

What took longer

The transition period. For the first few weeks some work still happened outside the system. We needed a way to mark work done without the kiosk after the fact — with full stock consequences, not as a cosmetic note.

Time standards. Only after several hundred reported operations did we see which cycle times had been invented. That is not a fault of the system; it is the first thing the system shows you — and you need to be willing to fix those standards rather than take offence at them.

The numbers

• 0 job cards to re-type.
• 1 badge printout instead of a daily schedule.
• 2 scans per task — that is the entire operator interface.

Job progress is visible in the office the same second the operator confirms it. It is the same number you give the customer over the phone, and that is the whole difference.