The plant model

The plant model

How Shop Floor describes your plant: sites, areas and lines, workcenter types, plant maps, the facility graph and shifts.

Boards are only as good as the plant model behind them. A machine that is not on a line is missing from every line-filtered board. A machine without a type is not measured. A plant without a map shows its machines as a list. The screens below are in the Plant group of the Shop Floor Setup menu.

Permissions: Editing the plant model needs DataMagik - Builder. Viewers see the result on the boards.

Sites

A site is one Plex PCN, with its credentials, timezone and (for machine data) its connector site. Every other setup screen asks which site it is working on, so add sites first. See Getting started for each field.

Workcenters

Workcenters are your Plex workcenters, brought in from Plex for each site. You cannot add or delete them in DataMagik, because a workcenter that Plex does not know about could never be joined to Plex data or written back. What you own is each workcenter's type and its line.

Workcenter types

Workcenter types (/shop-floor/settings/classify) says what each machine is: a press, a welder, an assembly cell, and so on. A workcenter's type decides which tags it must provide, what a custom app may ask it for, and what it is measured against.

• The Workcenters list shows each machine, What Plex says about it, its Type and what that type Requires. Each machine is marked Classified, Suggested, not yet accepted or Nothing suggested.
• See what Plex suggests runs guided setup, which derives types from machine names and Plex workcenter groups. Tick the ones you want and press Apply the ticked types.
• Under The type vocabulary you can rename a type and choose its Required tags. Tick none if the type groups machines but is not measured. A type's code cannot be changed, because machines and automations match on it.
• Choosing a type for a machine by hand pins it. Guided setup never changes a pinned machine.

Areas and lines

Areas and lines (/shop-floor/settings/lines) groups the plant so a board can cover part of it instead of all of it. A line belongs to an area.

1. Choose the site, then Add an area (for example "Press shop").
2. Press New line in that area and name it.
3. Under Machines not on a line, use Line for beside each machine to move it onto a line.

Machines that are not on a line appear on every unfiltered board and on none of the filtered ones. A line with no machines is marked as showing nothing when a board is filtered by it. You can rename or delete areas and lines. Deleting a line that has machines on it sends those machines back to Machines not on a line, and the confirmation tells you how many.

Plant maps

Plant maps (/shop-floor/settings/plant-maps) draws where machines are on the floor. The Plant Overview board and the Floor Console use these maps. Until a map exists, the Plant Overview shows machines as a list grouped by line.

1. Press + New map and give it a Map name.
2. Optionally press Upload floor plan, or choose a Blank or Grid background.
3. Drag machines from the tray onto the map. You can also use Find a machine, pick one and press Place.
4. Use Add zone and drag across the map to draw zones around groups of machines.
5. Choose how machines are labelled (Names, Codes or None) and press Save map.

Make this the console's map picks the map the Floor Console shows. The arrow keys move the selected zone or machine, Delete removes it, and plus and minus zoom.

The same page holds Plant Overview dashboards. Press + New dashboard to choose the Maps, in order it pages through, how often it moves on (Page between maps every), the Panels beside the map, in order, the theme, and whether to Show PA alerts on this dashboard. Preview on a TV shows how a 1920×1080 screen lays it out.

Facility graph

Facility graph (/shop-floor/settings/facility) is for plants that run vehicles such as AGVs. On top of a plant map, you draw where vehicles can go. Routes and travel times come from this drawing.

1. Plant map: choose a map, or upload one (PNG, JPG or SVG, up to 8 MB).
2. Set the scale: click two points whose real distance you know, such as two columns, and enter the distance in metres or feet.
3. Draw stations and lanes: add stations to pick up, drop, charge and park, add junctions, draw the lanes between them, and draw zones to avoid or slow down in.

Check a route shows the quickest saved route between two points for a vehicle width class (Narrow, Standard or Wide).

Shifts

Shifts are not drawn in DataMagik. They come from your Plex shift calendar, including breaks, and are read for each site. They decide how Hour by Hour splits a day, what the Shift Handover summarises, and which shift a production hour belongs to. If Hour by Hour finds no shift on a date, pick another date or check which shift cycle that workcenter is on in Plex. The Plant Readiness report grades Shifts, breaks and the report-date basis, so run it if shift figures look wrong.