The factory runs on shifts. The paperwork around it should too.
Production is measured to the minute, and everything surrounding it — the roster, the maintenance history, the day sheet, the spare part request — still moves at the speed of a spreadsheet and a phone call at five in the morning. NOWORX handles that surrounding layer: who is on shift, what the line reported, what each machine has been through, and what needs approving before the line can restart. It does not touch your line control; it fixes the record around it.
If this keeps happening
The roster survives until the first sick call
It was built in a spreadsheet on Thursday and printed for the wall. At five on Monday morning someone calls in, a supervisor spends forty minutes arranging a swap by phone, and the sheet on the wall is now fiction. Nobody updates it, so the version used to calculate hours at the end of the month is the one nobody worked.
Machine history lives in one technician's head
Which bearing was replaced in March, which vendor did the rebuild, how many times this drive has tripped this quarter — the answers are real, but they are inside a person. When that person is on leave or leaves for good, every decision about repair-or-replace becomes a guess with a five-figure consequence.
The day sheet gets written once and typed twice
The line leader fills a paper sheet at the end of the shift, someone in the office types it into a spreadsheet the next morning, and a transcription error surfaces a week later during a review nobody has time for. Two people did the same work, and the number you argue over is the one that was typed, not the one that was observed.
Warning signs are only visible looking backwards
Scrap creeping up for three days, downtime clustering after a particular changeover, one shift consistently slower on the same product. Everyone can see it in the monthly review. Nobody's actual job on Tuesday was to notice it on Tuesday, because noticing requires someone to compare this week's numbers to last week's before anyone has asked.
The line is stopped and the approval chain was designed for office spending
A part fails, procurement needs an authorisation, and the person who signs is in a meeting. The chain was built for laptops and stationery, not for a stopped line burning money by the hour. So somebody buys it anyway and does the paperwork afterwards, which quietly becomes the culture.
How the work runs in NOWORX
Tap an app name in any step to see what it does.
- 1
Build the roster, then keep it honest
Shifts are planned per person per day rather than assumed from a fixed pattern, so four-crew rotations, rotating nights and part-time cover all sit on the same calendar. When a swap happens the calendar changes and the record changes with it, instead of one person's memory holding the difference. Attendance is captured at shift start so hours per person per week are visible to whoever owns working-time compliance in your market — before the limit, not after it.
- 2
The day sheet, filed at the line
Output, downtime, scrap and the reason it stopped go in once, on a tablet or phone at the line, in fields short enough to fill with gloves on. Quality and first-off checks are their own forms so they are searchable later rather than buried in a comment. Anything unresolved at handover becomes an item with an owner, which is how the night shift stops inheriting problems it was never told about.
- 3
Equipment, maintenance history and spares
Every machine gets a register entry that accumulates its own history: services done, parts replaced, vendor, downtime events, next scheduled inspection. When a spare is needed the request carries the machine it is for, so six months later the cost of keeping that asset alive is a number rather than an argument. Urgent line-down requests can route on a shorter chain than office spend, and the agent chases the approver instead of the maintenance lead having to.
- 4
Watching the numbers between the monthly reviews
Watches run continuously over what the lines file — scrap rate against its own recent baseline, downtime concentrating on one asset, a shift drifting from the others on the same product. The agent raises it as a short note to the responsible department while the cause is still in living memory. Consumption and utilisation views answer the questions that usually take a day of spreadsheet work.
- 5
Cost, payroll inputs and the monthly pack
Hours worked flow from the same attendance record the supervisor confirmed, so payroll preparation stops being a reconstruction exercise. Maintenance spend, consumables and per-line cost sit next to the production numbers instead of in a different department's file. The morning briefing and the monthly pack are generated from what was filed, not rebuilt by hand the night before.
Frequently asked questions
Is this an MES or SCADA replacement?
No. NOWORX does not connect to controllers, does not run the line and does not replace production control. It manages the human layer around production: rosters, the day sheet, maintenance history, requests and approvals. If you already run a production system, its data can be brought in for browsing so people stop exporting spreadsheets to answer questions.
Can it detect defects on the line?
No. There is no vision inspection and no sensor-based quality judgement. The watches work on the numbers your team files — scrap counts, downtime minutes, reject reasons — and tell you when a series has drifted from its own recent pattern. That is a different and more modest claim than automated inspection, and we would rather be clear about it.
Our shift patterns are complicated and change every quarter.
The calendar is built per person per day, so it does not assume a pattern and does not break when you change one. Rotating nights, split crews, temporary cover and overlapping handovers all sit in the same view. What each person actually worked is a separate record from what was planned, which is the distinction that usually gets lost.
Our line leaders type slowly and often wear gloves.
That shaped the design: numeric fields, tap-to-select reasons, and as few free-text boxes as we could get away with. A shift report should take a minute at handover, not fifteen at a desk. If something is missing, the department agent asks for the one field it needs rather than bouncing the whole form back.
Will staff see this as surveillance?
What is recorded is what people file — shift attendance, output, downtime reasons, checks. There is no location tracking and no silent monitoring of individuals. If your site has a works council or staff representation, that distinction is usually the whole conversation, so it is worth stating plainly before rollout rather than after.
We have more than one plant. Does it handle that?
Yes — departments and sites are separate, so each plant sees its own rosters, assets and reports while group-level questions can be asked across all of them. Each department can have its own agent, which matters because maintenance, production and HR do not want the same summary.