Kettlewell Manufacturing
A shop-floor scheduling system replacing whiteboards and radio calls across three plants.
Industry
Manufacturing
Timeline
13 weeks
Team
2 engineers, 1 on-site liaison
Category
Custom Software
Where things stood
Shop-floor scheduling across Kettlewell's three plants ran on whiteboards and radio calls, so a machine going down in one plant wasn't visible to the scheduler until someone walked over or called it in.
How we got there
Shop-floor input devices
Deployed simple touchscreen terminals at each station so status updates come from the floor in real time instead of a radio call relayed twice.
Cross-plant scheduling view
Built a single scheduling view spanning all three plants so a delay in one location can be rerouted around instead of discovered after the fact.
Offline resilience
Designed the terminal software to keep logging locally through the shop floor's occasional network drops and sync once reconnected.
What changed
3
Plants on one scheduling system
~30%
Reduction in unplanned downtime response time
0
Whiteboards left in production use
Tech stack
Next.js
The cross-plant scheduling view schedulers use to see all three plants at once.
Node.js
Handles status updates coming in from shop-floor terminals in real time.
PostgreSQL
Tracks scheduling state across all three plants in one place.
WebSockets
Pushes machine-down alerts to the scheduler the moment a terminal reports one.
TypeScript
Kept scheduling logic consistent as three plants' rules were merged into one system.
AWS
Hosts the cross-plant scheduling service and terminal sync.
