PlatformPeople & skills
People — operators, skills & presence
Operator software that briefs the shift before it starts.
A schedule is only as good as the people standing in front of the machines, and shop-floor software is judged on the same floor. SmartFactory gives every operator an identity and a view of their own shift, checks assignments against who is actually qualified, and tells you ten minutes in if half the team is not on site.
Operator station
Built for a tablet, gloves and a noisy factory.
Software designed at a desk does not survive a press shop. This screen is built for the conditions it is actually used in: a tablet on a stand, gloves on, and about four seconds of patience.
- Big-button machine-side station with PIN login: start and complete jobs, log scrap with a reason, classify a stop, report a fault.
- Sessions expire on their own after a set idle period, so the last operator’s login is not still on the screen at midnight.
- PIN policy is enforced — no 0000, no ascending runs — and repeated failures lock that code briefly rather than allowing a thousand attempts.
- Material and labour booked here are what later become the cost per part on the works order.
Identity
Every operator gets an identity — in whichever form suits your floor.
- Three doors in, and you choose which are open: a PIN at the station, a full account for people who need one, or a printed QR badge for people who would rather not remember anything.
- Badges print on the same label engine as everything else, so issuing one is a two-minute job and not a procurement exercise.
- A badge is revocable in one click, and its code is never written into a log or a browser history — so a lost badge is an inconvenience rather than an incident.
- One operator record links the PIN, the account, the badge and the door-system identity — so the same person is the same person everywhere in the system.
Staff portal
Their shift, on their own device, without an account to chase.
Most manufacturing software never reaches the people it is describing. This is the part operators open themselves, on the phone already in their pocket, and there is no seat to buy for it — users are unlimited on every plan.
- A personal view that answers the three questions people actually ask — which shift am I on, which machine am I on, and what is it running — checked from home before the shift, not discovered on arrival. Works on their own phone, which is exactly where that question gets asked.
- The tool changes affecting their machine are on the same screen, so the changeover is not a surprise announced by the arrival of a trolley.
- Their skills and training record are visible to them — including what they are qualified for and what they are not.
- The portal is read-mostly by design: an operator can raise a training request, and nothing else about the factory can be changed from a phone in a pocket.
Skills & training
Who is qualified for what — and who said so.
- A skills matrix that records the skill, who granted it, who trained them and when — the evidence an auditor asks for when they ask how you know.
- Skills unlock specific machines and specific parts, so “qualified” means something precise rather than a general reputation.
- Operators can request training themselves; a supervisor approves it and the training record is created in the same action, so the matrix does not drift from reality.
- Expiring or missing qualifications are visible before the shift rather than after the audit.
Assignment board
People to machines, checked against what they are actually qualified to run.
- A. Whitfield IMM-03 Qualified · IMM setter On site 05:52
- J. Okafor IMM-05 Qualified · IMM operator On site 05:58
- R. Pearce IMM-07 ⚠ Not qualified for IMM-07 On site 06:03
- S. Doyle CELL-06 Qualified · Assembly Not yet on site
Presence is information, not enforcement — nobody is locked out of a machine by a door reader.
- Assign people to machines for each shift on one board, with the skills matrix checking your work as you go.
- Putting someone on a machine they are not signed off for raises a warning where you can see it — you can still do it, and the system records that you did.
- The board carries presence dots, so “planned” and “here” are two visibly different things.
- Tool-change cover can be checked the same way, so a shift with three changeovers and nobody from the toolroom is caught on Friday rather than Monday.
Presence
“Three of eight planned operators are not yet on site.”
Ten minutes into a shift, that sentence is worth more than any dashboard. It comes from the door system you already have.
- SmartFactory integrates with Paxton Net2 through a small on-premises connector — so nothing on your access-control network is exposed and no inbound firewall rule is needed.
- The connector pushes events out only, batching and retrying through a local queue: if the link drops, events land when it comes back rather than being lost.
- Events are matched to operator records by their existing card or user identity, so nobody re-keys a staffing list.
- Presence shows as dots on the assignment board and as a single count at shift start — the number you want before you have finished your first coffee.
Presence is for information only. SmartFactory is not an HR or time-and-attendance system: it does no timesheets and no payroll, does not derive labour cost from door events, and never uses presence to prevent anyone from starting a machine or a job.
See your factory live in thirty minutes.
Book a demo and we’ll walk you through a running factory — or register for a free trial and get a simulated factory of your own to play with, the same day. No hardware, no card, no IT project.