Loading
Loading
Internal showcase
Plant software that states the facts and gets out of the way.
Context
Flowline is our internal proving ground for manufacturing work: a full ERP slice for a fictional contract manufacturer with two halls, thirty machines, and a planner who still trusts paper. We use it to test how much automation a plant accepts before it stops trusting the screen.
Challenge
Plant software is used standing up, mid-shift, with dirty hands and no patience for scrolling. Every screen has to answer one question fast: what runs where, what is blocked, what is late. Decoration costs seconds, and seconds are the unit of trust here.
Approach
work.projects.flowline.solution
Research
We studied how planners actually read a whiteboard: rows, not cards; states, not stories. That settled an early argument. The work-order board became a table with visible column rules, because rounded cards would have thrown away the density the whiteboard already had.
User flow
The essential path through the product, step by step.
Open orders sort by due date and material readiness before the shift starts.
Release reserves material and puts the order on its machine's queue in one step.
The machine strip shows running, idle, and fault states as they change.
A fault or shortage turns its row orange and names the person who owns it.
Completed quantities and downtime land in the shift report automatically.
Design direction
White and cool grey, royal blue for structure, safety orange strictly for alerts. Square corners everywhere, visible column rules, mono digits in every cell. It is designed to look correct next to a machine control panel, because that is where it runs.
Interface preview of Flowline with illustrative demo data, no client information.
Architecture
The layers that make it dependable, from client to data.
A dense web application built for wide screens and shop-floor terminals.
Stages, queues, and releases with material reservations in one transaction.
Machine states normalized from PLC and operator inputs into the status strip.
Stock, reservations, and consumption in a relational model with full history.
Responsive
The plant runs Flowline on terminals and wide screens, and the layout is honest about that. On a phone it narrows to supervision: machine states, exception rows, and shift totals. Nobody plans production on a phone, so Flowline does not pretend they do.
Interface preview of Flowline with illustrative demo data, no client information.
Outcome
The internal build is where our manufacturing patterns get proven before a client sees them: the table-first board, the signal ingest, and the reservation model. It keeps our estimates honest, because the hard parts have already been built once.
Stack
06
Next case study
Demonstration interfaceScheduling software that keeps a clinic's day quiet.