With the idea of text messages in mind, but knowing the limitations, we decided to build a mobile app.

Now what you get, in addition to the email and a browser notification, is a push notification on your phone. Then, you can open the SensrTrx app where you can look at the current production run, and answer the questions, “What’s going on? Why is there an alert?”

Basically, the app provides all of the associated context and information about what’s happening in the plant, from anywhere in the world. As any Plant Manager or VP of Ops knows, it’s important to be aware of the plant’s progress, whether sitting in the office, traveling to see a customer, or turning in for the night.

Regardless of the location, you’re able to check and see how things are running with the click of a few buttons.

The manufacturing app provides the visibility, timeliness, and ease of use SensrTrx promises, anywhere you go.

Most importantly, we still follow the design strategy guidelines we’ve established from the start by concentrating on ease of use over ultimate flexibility. You can’t do everything in the app because we stick by our initial belief that our software, and the manufacturing app, in particular, needs to be simple, easy to use, and easy to understand. This strategy is what gives the user the ability to find what they need, without too much complexity.

We’ve had manufacturers tell us they were visiting customers across the globe and were able to pull up the mobile app while traveling. They were able to see how the plant was running, on a train or in an Uber. It’s that intuitive.

The use case for the mobile app goes beyond just real-time alerts, too. It gives the factory, and those who work there, more flexibility in the way their jobs operate. If you’re a manufacturer who allows phones on the floor, and nowadays, most do, albeit as long as the phones are used for work purposes only, it provides better access to SensrTrx.

All of your operators and supervisors can have access to the software and can also get alerts, too.

With SensrTrx Mobile, production teams can see availability, performance, and quality, across all of their machines and cells and view all alerts. By delivering event alerts directly to the app, supervisors and operators can respond to real-time issues immediately. Previously, alerts were sent out by email which while triggered in real-time were easy to miss when out on the plant floor. Now through mobile-native messaging, users receive alerts based on their own notification settings and preferences, meaning they will never again have to miss an important downtime event or issue that demands their attention.

The SensrTrx mobile application represents another major step of the manufacturing analytics company towards providing their customers unprecedented visibility on the plant floor. This release furthers the company’s mission to improving productivity through affordable data collection and practical, easy-to-use analytics.

The app is available to all SensrTrx users with an account at the IoS App Store and Google Android Play Store.

Plant floor visibility allows manufacturers the ability to reduce downtime, improve throughput and capacity, and reduce scrap, among other benefits. SensrTrx developed the streamlined version of the original desktop and mobile-friendly application to further maximize the power of plant floor visibility through real-time alerts and performance monitoring on their smartphone.

Manufacturers shouldn’t be limited to only understanding plant performance while sitting at a desk in an office. The need for real-time alerts, anywhere, prompted the development of a manufacturing app.

From the start, we’ve had alerts inside the system that, based on certain conditions, sends email notifications or pop-ups in the browser of the device used. This is how it was originally designed – to provide notice of an issue on the floor.

The problem with this was the time it took to deliver the notification, potentially up to a minute, and if the person was not at their desk, they weren’t seeing the pop-up on the browser.

There were limitations.

In response, a lot of people requested text message alerts so they would be alerted anywhere, anytime. While that is very easy to do, there is one problem with texts. You’re limited to the amount of text you can put in the message, which would limit our ability to provide context. All we could really do in a text message was tell the person an alert tripped, but we couldn’t provide any extra detail until they were able to either access their email or log on to a browser to read the alert notification

As a software company, our goal is to provide context into operations so providing context in alerts is crucial. Text messages just didn’t provide the level of detail we want to provide to our customers. It wouldn’t help them identify the cause of a problem easily. All they’d know is if there was extra downtime or a specific alarm was tripped on a particular machine, not why it was happening. It defeats the purpose of being real-time manufacturing productivity software.

In an email, the context could be included, but in a text message, it can’t. So we were back to square one. What could we create that would provide the user with the ease of use they needed, but also included the details of the problem? A manufacturing app, accessible through any Android or iPhone device.

In the future, we see this app growing, exponentially. While we recently added a full-featured iPad app to our repertoire, there is always room to grow.

We’d like to add additional features to collect more data to help operators out on the floor. For example, to a certain extent, you should be able to record production on your phone. You should be able to respond to downtime prompts, enter scrap reasons, those basic things that, in certain types of manufacturing, you’re not always close enough to a computer to do.

The same idea applies to adding the ability to call for help. If an operator needs help from someone, whether that’s a supervisor or the maintenance team, they should be able to call for help from the phone application.

The best example to demonstrate what this could do for the plant is with the maintenance team. Companies often have horns, lights, or buttons for operators to push to indicate they need help from maintenance. Maintenance will hear the horn or see the light and assist the person.

But, a lot of times, they don’t see or hear the indicators, and without alerts, they don’t know that someone needs help on the floor. This way, with the features we want to add in the future, maintenance could receive an alert, directly on their phone, based on what’s happening on the machine that indicates something needs to be fixed.