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Production tracking in Excel: where do machine hours come from?
Excel is a good place to keep orders, plans and stock when you track production, but it can't know how many hours a machine ran. The hours in the sheet are numbers someone wrote on a form or typed into a cell. Kaya measures that time by reading the tower light on the machine from the cameras in your factory.
How tracking in Excel works
In many shops, production tracking starts with an Excel file. Each row is a work order, and the columns hold the machine, the operator, start and end times and the quantity made. Operators write it down on paper or a tablet, and someone copies it into the sheet at the end of the shift or the week.
For orders, due dates and stock, that is often enough. Everyone knows Excel, and it is easy to adapt as needs change.
Where the hours column comes from
The weak spot is usually the column where runtime goes. The number there shows what the operator wrote, not how long the machine actually ran.
Short stops, minutes spent waiting for material and setup time often don't make it onto the form. On a busy day the entry is made after the job, from memory. The formulas may be right, but the result is only as good as the numbers that went in.
That isn't carelessness on the operator's part. Their job is to keep production going, and record-keeping is a second job on top of it. Moving the form to a tablet doesn't change that, because the hours still depend on what someone enters.
Runtime comes from the light
The tower light already shows the machine's state. Green means it's running, amber means it has stopped and red means alarm.
Kaya reads that light through the camera. The operator enters nothing, and no sensor is fitted to the machine. If your cameras see the lights clearly you don't need new ones; if they don't, a camera's angle can be changed or a camera added.
Kaya reports running, stopped, alarm and time with the light amber and nobody at the machine separately, so stops that never made it onto a form appear in the report as their own time. If there is a period when the camera can't see the machine, Kaya doesn't fill it with a guess. It records that period as "no evidence".
You don't have to give up Excel
Kaya doesn't replace your Excel file or your ERP. You can export reports as PDF or CSV and put the measured hours next to your own sheet. Factories also use the reports to prepare quotes and plan capacity.
Connecting an ERP is optional. Kaya connects to Odoo today, and other ERP systems are planned. With an ERP connected, hours can be assigned to work orders and customers. Without one, Kaya still measures each machine's runtime.
If you calculate OEE, Kaya provides the runtime and downtime used for Availability. Performance and Quality need more data, such as part counts, an ideal cycle time and scrap counts.
Comparing past months
If your recorder (NVR/DVR) still holds footage from earlier days, Kaya can analyse those recordings too. How far back it can go depends on how long the recorder keeps footage.
That lets you put last month's hours from Excel next to the measured runtime for the same days. If a number looks wrong to you, open the camera frames for that hour and see what colour the light was.
The Kaya page lists what Kaya doesn't do, and setup questions are answered in the FAQ.
The first 30 days are free
You can try Kaya free for 30 days. During that time it measures your machines' runtime from your existing cameras, and at the end we go through the results with you.
Do your machines have tower lights, and can a camera see them? Write to info@glotech.io.