Manufacturing & production Usage scenario

Tablet entry at the workstation and a production dashboard up to date the same day

Replacing the paper sheets of a processing unit with tablet entry at the workstation, stock tracking with alerts and a dashboard up to date the same day.

Describe your project See the solution

Project overview

This scenario illustrates what we build; it is not a client reference.

This scenario shows how a processing unit that writes its production on paper can enter it on a tablet at the workstation, follow its raw material stock with threshold alerts, and read its figures the same evening instead of waiting for the monthly report.

Client challenges & requirements

A juice bottling unit near Conakry runs 2 lines with around thirty workers in 2 shifts. At each workstation the team leader fills in a paper sheet: quantity produced, losses, machine stops, bottles and caps used. The sheets go to the office, where an assistant copies them into Excel at the end of the month.

The manager then discovers that a line lost half a day at the start of the month, or that the sugar stock hit zero on a Friday. When a sheet is missing, the monthly figure is wrong and nobody knows by how much.

Main objectives

Replace paper sheets with tablet entry at the workstation, in a few taps per shift

Track raw material and packaging stock, with an alert when a threshold is reached

Give the manager a production dashboard up to date the same day

Keep a record of each machine stop with its cause and duration

Project solution

We start small

One Android tablet per line, fixed at the workstation, with a Flutter app that reproduces the existing paper sheet screen by screen. The team leader picks the line, the shift and the product, then enters the quantities with large buttons. A machine stop is recorded in two taps: cause from a list, start time, end time. If the workshop wifi drops, the tablet keeps the entries and sends them later.
Each production entry decrements the materials and packaging stock in a PostgreSQL database; when sugar or caps fall below the threshold set by the manager, he receives a WhatsApp message with the quantity to order. A Metabase dashboard shows production per line and per shift, losses, stops and stock, readable on a phone. During the first month, the paper sheets continue in parallel to check that the figures match.

Indicators to track

Delay between the end of a shift and the availability of its figures
Number of missing or incomplete sheets per month
Number of raw material shortages
Total machine stop time per line

Tech stack

Saisie au poste: Flutter Tablette Android SQLite (mode hors connexion)
Back-office: Laravel PostgreSQL
Tableaux de bord: Metabase
Alertes: WhatsApp Business API SMS
Exploitation: Docker Hébergeur choisi avec le client

Frequently asked questions

The screen reproduces the paper sheet they know, with the same boxes in the same order. We train the team leaders on site and keep the paper in parallel during the first month. If an entry causes trouble, we simplify the screen rather than train more.

The tablet keeps the entries locally and sends them as soon as the network is back. The dashboard shows the time of the last synchronisation of each line, so the manager knows whether a figure is current.

Yes. Machine stops are already recorded with their cause. A next step adds a preventive maintenance schedule and a breakdown history per machine, on the same database.