Let PC‑Topp.NET help you to improve production flow in conversion by ensuring that materials required for production on the machines are available on time. The new Material Preparation Terminal is a valuable instrument for avoiding machine downtime in conversion due to missing materials.

At the new terminal the status of the materials required for all scheduled orders is displayed with colored dots. The personnel responsible for readying inks, dies, pallets etc. can see at any time whether everything is prepared for producing an order and, if not, what is still missing.

The items to be prepared can be individually configured; the available options are:

Color Coded Preparation Status

Unprepared items appear as white dots (). After having prepared an item for an order the person in charge clicks this item’s status dot to change it to “ready” (). In case it isn’t available (due to damage, insufficient stock etc.) he can set its status to “not ready” ().

The overall preparation status of an order only changes to “ready” if all individual items required for an order are marked “ready”. As long as the materials for the order are only partially prepared (e.g. the inks and the dies are ready but the pallets aren’t) the order’s overall status remains yellow (), indicating that the preparation has begun but isn’t finished yet.

If the mouse is moved over the overall status indicator for an order’s machine or for the order itself the status details of all required materials are shown in a tooltip. Thus it is easy to keep track of an order’s overall preparation status and to check what is still missing.

(Orders with nothing to prepare are marked with .)

Customizable View

By default the orders are shown by start time so the ones that have be prepared next are always on top. Thus the person in charge can always make sure he doesn’t overlook imminent orders which are not yet completely prepared. But if he wants to prepare the materials for all orders scheduled on a specific machine he can switch the view to display just this machine.

Print Out Material Preparation List

Staff members responsible for readying production materials can’t always stay within eyeshot of the Material Preparation Terminal. They can export the list of orders to prepare in PDF format for printout so they can take the materal preparation list along.