The plant now achieves first-time QA everytime, and the system's operating principles are easy to grasp by all production line personnel. The system prints the exact number of labels needed, and the control center sends serial communications transaction advice to the host and can process data even if the host is down. There are a minimum 4,000 production cards active at any one time, each with an average of 20 operations such as assembly, inspection, QA, painting, job routing, etc. The transaction process manager is linked to a Unix and performs all system mirroring and the interface. The three powerful transaction processors maintain the system in real time without dependence on the PC or host and automatically support multiple terminal sessions concurrently.
Supervisors can now inquire as to who has clocked on and what job are they working on.
Adams Brands faced this situation at its 200,000-square foot manufacturing plant in Scarborough, Ontario, where it produces and packages such consumer products as Dentyne chewing gum, Certs breath mints and Halls throat pastilles. These products come under the auspices of the HPB, and Adams Brands needed to integrate a system for printing such variable data as lot control number, production time and lot code freshness date on the shipping cartons. There are 15 production and packaging lines where people used to have to hand-stamp data on the cartons while they were still flat and unused. This had the potential for bottlenecks and wasted cartons. Having a separate printer for each line would pose all sorts of other problems.