Modules

Seven product modules — start with what hurts most, expand as you grow. Each module works standalone and shares the same data backbone.

Planning

Finite-capacity scheduling that stays honest

Drag-and-drop planning with shift calendars, changeover intelligence, and real-time rate feedback from the floor. Replace the planner's Excel with a living schedule.

Timeline & Kanban

Drag-and-drop timeline and Kanban views for production scheduling. Assign orders to lines, set sequences, and publish schedules that operators see instantly. Horizon planning lets you look days or weeks ahead.

Constraint-based sequencing

Changeover minimisation, due-date priority, item group affinity, and custom rules automate the tedious sequencing decisions. Changeover matrix templates encode time costs by product family, allergen class, or colour.

Freeze windows & adherence

Protect today's plan while allowing soft changes for tomorrow. Schedule adherence tracking compares planned vs actual start, end, and quantity for every job — updated in real time from machine counters.

Live rate feedback

Actual run rates from counters continuously adjust expected durations. If the line is running slow, the schedule reflects it immediately — the plan becomes a living document, not a snapshot.

Execution & Visibility

Real-time visibility into what's running and whether you're on track

Live line status, job progress, and gap explanation — so management gets trusted answers without walking the floor.

Live line status

Every line shows its current state in real time: Running, Stopped, Idle, Starved, or Blocked — derived from machine counters and optional run/stop signals. Updated via WebSocket within seconds.

Progress vs target

Active orders display current good count, target quantity, progress percentage, and estimated completion time. Updated live from the shop floor.

Gap analysis

Explains the difference between planned and actual: downtime minutes, speed loss minutes, and scrap — so you know why you're behind, not just that you are.

Plant overview

A live, interactive model of your entire plant. See machine states, active orders, operator assignments, and KPIs across every line — all on a single screen with drill-down.

Operational master data

Product tags, ideal rates, UoM conversions, and changeover families — maintained with validation rules and duplicate detection. Counters help infer ideal rates and highlight inconsistencies.

Performance

OEE-lite with auto-detection and root-cause analysis

Auto-detect downtime from counters, capture reasons in one tap, and see exactly where your output is lost — availability, performance, and quality.

Auto downtime detection

Machine counters detect state changes automatically — running, idle, or down — based on configurable thresholds. No manual stop/start required.

1-tap reason capture

When downtime starts, the operator tablet pushes a reason prompt with hierarchical categories. Add notes and photos for context. Optionally tag 'maintenance needed' to create a work request.

OEE-lite dashboard

Availability (downtime), Performance (speed loss), and Quality (scrap) — broken down by line, shift, product, and time period. Loss tree analysis shows where the biggest opportunities are.

Trend analytics

OEE trends, throughput comparisons, scrap analysis, and shift benchmarks — all built from live production data. Filter by line, item group, or date range and export reports.

Digital Documentation

Digital changeovers, batch records, SOPs, and shift handovers

Replace paper checklists with enforced digital workflows. Every step is timed, every field is required, and every signature is traceable.

Changeover & line clearance checklists

Digital checklist templates per line and product family with required fields, pass/fail criteria, and photo evidence. QA release gate prevents the next job until clearance is complete.

Digital batch records

Batch record templates with required steps and measurement points. Auto-fill timestamps, machine data, lot IDs, and counts. Incomplete or unsigned steps are flagged immediately.

Shift handover logs

Structured handover forms per line: top issues, actions taken, risks, and material shortages. Auto-attaches the shift's downtime Pareto and quality alarms for context.

Work instruction versioning

Digital work instructions with rich text, images, and step-by-step checkpoints — all versioned. Link required versions to products or orders. Proof-of-use records complete the audit trail.

Role-based e-signoff

Multi-level approval workflows: operator confirms completion, supervisor reviews, QA approves. Every signature is timestamped and tied to the user's authenticated session.

Quality

Structured quality checks, SPC-lite, and deviation management

Move from paper QC sheets to scheduled in-process checkpoints with trend detection, defect coding, and corrective action tracking.

In-process checkpoints

Checkpoint schedules triggered by time, quantity (from counters), or batch events. Operators enter measurements on the tablet, linked to batch, order, and timestamp.

SPC-lite alerting

Out-of-spec alerts, trend warnings (e.g., 3 consecutively increasing points), and control limit violations. Early detection prevents scrap before it accumulates.

Scrap & defect codes

Quick scrap reason capture with structured defect codes. Every scrap event tied to batch, machine, operator, and time. Top loss tree reveals patterns and correlations.

Deviation & CAPA-lite

Raise deviations from any event — downtime, QC fail, scrap spike. Assign owner, due date, and checklist. Effectiveness checks trigger automatically after configurable intervals.

Fill weight & variance control

Weight or volume checkpoints with SPC-lite trending. Detect giveaway (overfill) and underfill risk. Correlate with changeovers, shifts, and material batches.

Compliance-grade audit trail

Immutable logging of every critical event with user identity, timestamp, and full context. Audit export per batch generates print-ready documentation for regulatory review.

Traceability & Inventory

Lot traceability, inventory accuracy, and line-side replenishment

Close the gap between ERP inventory and physical reality — from lot capture at batch start to FEFO enforcement and digital kanban at the line.

Lot-at-start capture

Operators scan or enter raw material lots at batch start. Finished goods lots are recorded at batch end. Full genealogy chain: RM lots → batch → FG lots → shipments.

Genealogy graph & recall export

Trace any lot forward and backward through internal transformations. Recall audit export generates a one-page report with all affected lots, quantities, and destinations.

Consumption tracking

Confirm staged lots at batch start, auto-calculate expected consumption from counters and BOM, and capture substitutions. Push reconciled data to ERP.

FEFO enforcement

Line-side staging board shows lots sorted by expiry. Warn when non-FEFO lot is used (override with reason). Alerts for lots approaching expiry in staging or quarantine.

Line-side digital kanban

Min/max bin levels per item. Operator taps 'bin empty' or scans QR — replenishment task created instantly. Track response time and link starvation downtime to replenishment latency.

Warehouse workflows

Barcode-driven receiving, putaway, picking, shipping, and cycle counts with full lot tracking. Offline-first: every action queued locally and synced when connectivity returns.

Costing & Maintenance

Operational batch costing and maintenance-lite

Know the true cost per good unit and connect maintenance actions to downtime events — without full ERP cost accounting or heavyweight CMMS.

Batch cost per good unit

Compute cost per good unit from material (standard or captured lots), labour (shift allocation or operator check-in), and yield (good/scrap from counters). Dashboard shows top drivers.

Cost comparison analytics

Compare cost per good unit across products, lines, shifts, and time periods. Surface where margin is being lost without full cost accounting complexity.

Work requests from downtime

From any downtime event, tap 'Create work request' — pre-filled with machine, time, duration, and reason. Maintenance team sees prioritised requests with full production context.

Preventive maintenance calendar

Simple PM calendar with checklists for recurring maintenance tasks. Assigned to technicians with due dates. Maintenance history per machine builds over time.

MTBF / MTTR dashboards

Mean time between failures and mean time to repair derived automatically from downtime events and work completion timestamps. Data-driven repair vs replace decisions.

Available across all modules

AI that understands your factory

Frontlink's AI agents have deep contextual access to every table in your databases — production orders, machine telemetry, quality records, inventory movements, and operator sessions. They don't work from summaries; they query your actual operational data.

Ask a question like 'Why did OEE drop on Line 3 last Tuesday?' and the agent traces the answer across machine state changes, downtime events, changeover logs, and quality holds.

Agents don't just read data — they take action. Schedule maintenance, adjust sequences, or generate reports. Every action follows safety boundaries, produces an audit trail, and supports human-in-the-loop approval.

Full Database Contextualisation

Agents understand your complete data model — from raw telemetry to ERP-synced orders. No manual data mapping required.

Natural Language Queries

Ask operational questions in plain language. The agent translates intent into precise database queries and returns structured answers.

Autonomous Task Execution

Agents execute multi-step tasks: adjusting schedules, triggering reports, updating configurations — all within defined operational boundaries.

Audit Trails & Safety Boundaries

Every agent action is logged with full context. Role-based boundaries and human-in-the-loop approval prevent unintended consequences.

Operational Intelligence

Pattern detection across production runs, shift performance, and quality trends. Agents surface insights you didn't know to look for.

Operator Interface

The operator's command centre

A tablet-optimised interface that gives operators real-time visibility into machine performance, material consumption, and quality requirements — without leaving the production line.

Real-time Monitoring

Live OEE, throughput, and machine state at a glance. Operators see exactly what their line is doing — running, idle, or down — with second-level granularity.

Material Issue (Weigh & Dispense)

Guided weigh-and-dispense workflows for precise material consumption. Scale integration ensures accuracy, and every dispense is recorded against the production order.

Quality Control

In-line quality checks triggered by time, quantity, or batch events. Operators complete digital forms, capture photos, and submit results — all without paper.

Label Printing

Print product labels, batch labels, and pallet tags directly from the operator screen. Templates are configured per item and line, with dynamic fields filled automatically.

Downtime Monitoring

Operators register downtime reasons directly from the tablet when a machine stops. Categorise by cause and feed accurate data into OEE and availability reports.

Custom Screens

Build tailored operator views without code changes. Surface the exact data, forms, and actions each workstation needs — from SOP checklists to machine-specific dashboards.

Platform foundations

Modular architecture

Multi-tenant, config-driven design that scales from one line to a global footprint without code forks. Start with one module and expand when you're ready.

Workflow engine

Visual workflow builder for approvals, escalations, and exception handling across plants. Route decisions based on roles, thresholds, and production context.

Unified data backbone

Real-time events contextualised in a shared namespace. ERP, machines, and people speak the same language — one PostgreSQL database with row-level tenant isolation.

ERP integration

Bi-directional sync with Exact Online and other ERPs. Orders, items, BOMs, and confirmations flow automatically — production reality stays aligned with finance.

Offline-first resilience

Edge gateways and the warehouse PWA use store-and-forward queuing. Data is never lost even when connectivity drops — operations continue uninterrupted.

High-volume telemetry

TimescaleDB handles millions of sensor readings per day with automatic compression and retention policies. Machine state changes reach dashboards in under a second.

See Frontlink in action

Book a personalised demo or explore the platform architecture to understand how it all connects.