Is your manufacturing environment order-driven? Do you Engineer-to-Order or Customize-to-Order? Do your spaghetti diagrams look more like a network than continuous flow? If you struggle with production cycle-times that are too long and inventories that are too high, we have a solution!

Introducing Vortex, a Shop Floor Control system designed to minimize your production cycle time and reduce inventory. Vortex works to pull production through your factory exactly when it’s needed! It predicts when a work center will be in need of more work, identifies the highest priority batch in all upstream work centers, and then authorizes the batch to be started just at the right time for it to reach the work center exactly when it is needed.

Upstream work is only released if there is downstream demand, thus implementing one of the basic tenets of Lean Manufacturing – demand-pull production – in the high-variety, order-driven factory.

Sounds simple, right?  In theory, yes.  However, if you’re talking dozens of work centers, dozens of different work flows and varying batches of sizes and flow times – predicting the time at which more work than is currently authorized for production will be needed can very quickly get complicated – the real-time calculations piling up pretty fast.

 
Vortex streamlines the thousands of computations with a patent-pending algorithm, which works not only to synthesize all the math, but also integrate those solutions directly into your production system.

Vortex’s modern, standards-based API is compatible with most ERP and Shop Floor Control systems.  The fully featured API allows your ERP and other internal systems to always stay up-to-date with the status of work on the shop floor. Vortex relies on your existing ERP system to create Work Orders according to your existing planning policies and inject them into the system through the API.  From there, Vortex handles the Starts into each work center based on demand-pull policies – minimizing both cycle-time and Work-in-Process inventories.  

Check out our demo based on the following 5 products with individual work flows through 10 work centers. To view the demo, please click the link on this page - or drop us a line and we will take you for the tour.