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A production line at night seen low along its conveyor. Ivory parts move past dark machine cells, and a fine coral line leaves the conveyor across the floor.

Manufacturing operations

The 720-hour plant.

Your machines run every hour of the month. Our agents work each shortage, stoppage and late order the minute it appears, and test every move against the week ahead first.

Today

Your machines run 720 hours a month. Your decisions run about 160.

  • A shortage at 02:14 waits for the planner at 07:30. By then two lines have starved and the night crew has resequenced without logging it.
  • Your planners spend the morning copying MES numbers into spreadsheets to rebuild a plan the ERP thinks is running.

Night shift

A dark miniature plant floor seen at an angle: three lines of machine blocks with ivory parts on their conveyors. Faint hairline copies of the floor rise above it, the week ahead, with a single coral line running up through them.

  1. 02:14

    Press 2 runs short of housings. Order 4417 has parts for 300 of its 800.

  2. 02:14

    Its agent reads the order, stock, inbound truck and press counters.

  3. 02:15

    Before it moves anything, it plays the week forward three hundred times on a model of your floor.

  4. 02:15

    Most runs starve line 3 by Thursday. It keeps the plan that feeds every line.

  5. 02:16

    Under your planners' standing shortage grant, 4417 is split, cell 6 takes the next order and the truck is expedited.

  6. 03:40

    A stop with no reason code is traced through the PLC. A scrap rise on cell 4 gets a hold for quality.

  7. 07:30

    Your planners arrive at a plant that is caught up, its ERP plan matching the floor.

Exceptions

Eight kinds of exception, each worked until the floor has the fix.

Every action carries the agent that made it and the grant or person that released it. Your planners can reverse any of it.

  1. Shortage
  2. Downtime
  3. Scrap
  4. Late order
  5. Changeover
  6. Starvation
  7. Labour gap
  8. Quality hold
What each exception produces
  • Shortage. A split release, a pulled-forward order and an expedite, each with its stock and transit evidence.
  • Downtime. The stop's cause, read from the PLC states and the historian, and a drafted maintenance notification when the cause is equipment.
  • Scrap. The lot, machine, shift and fixture behind the rise, and a quarantine hold when the parts can be traced.
  • Late order. A new promise date with each option priced in changeover minutes and freight.
  • Changeover. The overrun from release to first good part, and a corrected standard when the routing is wrong.
  • Starvation. An upstream sequence that keeps the bottleneck fed, inside the released routings.
  • Labour gap. A sequence the reduced crew can hold, with every reassignment on the record.
  • Quality hold. A disposition package with lot genealogy and the schedule impact, for your quality engineer to decide.

Your works council reads the same record: every sequence change and crew reassignment with the agent that drafted it and the grant or person that released it.

A machining fixture clamped on the slotted table of a milling machine, dark steel with two coral locating pins and a coral datum line along its edge.

Standards

Your standards keep up with the floor.

The routing says a changeover on mill 3 takes 40 minutes. Since the new fixture it takes 58. The standard becomes Operating Code with a test, and every plan uses 58 from the next order.

What stays current
  • Changeover minutes per routing and fixture, from release to the first good part.
  • Cycle times per machine and part, from the counters.
  • Scrap limits per routing, so a rise is measured against what the process really does.
  • Buffer sizes ahead of the bottleneck, from every starvation the fleet has worked.
  • Your ERP routing receives each change as a draft with its evidence, so the master data catches up as well.
  • How your planners resolve each kind of exception. When a senior planner retires, the way they resolved exceptions stays in the code.
plant/standards/changeover.py

Architecture

  1. Operating Code

    Routings, standards and plant rules run as tested code.

  2. Gate

    Agents read freely and act only where an exception class holds a grant.

  3. Your infrastructure

    On your plant servers, or on Marbell Cloud in Switzerland.

  4. Fleet

    Shift briefs at 06:00, 14:00 and 22:00. A restart never creates a work order twice.

For your engineers
  • Operating Code rewrites the agent's instructions, rules, plans, checks and memory as code. A rule becomes an if and a plan becomes a loop. Memory is a typed variable and a check is a test. It grew out of the recursive self-improvement harness our own persistent agents run on.
  • Types close the gaps where plants lose data. A ScrapReason has no "other" and a WorkOrderId never takes free text. Preconditions stop bad work before a draft exists: a locked order is never resequenced and batch sizes are never converted after the first operation.
  • The rehearsal runs a finite-capacity model of your floor built from released routings, live counters, crews and inbound trucks. Each candidate plan runs to the end of the week; plans that starve a line, break a promise date or exceed the overtime budget are dropped.
  • A provisional value, such as the changeover time of a fixture that has run twice, is marked provisional with its owner and is used the same way by every agent until the floor confirms it.
  • Each release rolls out to a line or a shift first and rolls back per line or per shift in a single step. It reaches every agent on its next call.
  • Every draft carries a key built from the order, the event and the draft itself, so a restarted agent finds its own work. A failed action is retried twice from its checkpoint, then goes to the coordinator, then to your on-call planner within the hour.
  • The rehearsal borrows its scheduler from our own materials simulation program.
Gate policy

Grants are written per exception class and per resource. Withdraw a grant at 03:00 and the agent's next request is denied.

// Gate policy (Cedar)
permit (principal in Agents::"plant", action in [Action::"read", Action::"draft"], resource in Plant::"plant-1");

permit (principal in Agents::"shortage", action == Action::"release", resource is WorkOrder)
when { resource.class in principal.granted_classes && !resource.locked };

forbid (principal, action == Action::"write", resource in Plant::"safety");

Systems

We read your line through the interfaces you already run.

  • SAP S/4HANA
  • Siemens Opcenter
  • Rockwell FactoryTalk
  • AVEVA PI
  • OPC UA
  • Your TMS

Agents never write to safety-rated systems or interlocks.

All systems
  • MES event bus: orders, downtime, quantities and causes
  • PLC tags over OPC UA, read only
  • The plant historian, read only
  • ERP through IDoc, BAPI or OData, drafts first
  • Maintenance in SAP PM or Maximo
  • Shift and staffing plans
  • Work instructions, routings and released standards
  • Your own internal APIs

Quality is the next pilot on the same queue, growing out of the quality holds it already works.

A machine hall at first light under a sawtooth roof. Pale light falls across the machine cells, and a short coral line on the floor ends at a machine's input.

Start with your night shift.

We take a line and its night shift for a quarter. The pilot is paid to move a number you pick: schedule adherence, exception response time or planner hours returned.

Describe your plant How a pilot runs