Production monitoring system – Hawk Eye

The Challenge

The Hawk Eye project was commissioned by a Fortune 500 Global High-tech Manufacturing Company in 2019.

The client wanted to represent the real-time production status and key indicators over the CAD floorplan. It should serve as a visual dashboard for Production Managers and help in enhancing the decision making process. They wanted to implement it for one of their plant located in Austin, Texas, USA.

Showcase a working proof of concept in 2 weeks time to stand a chance to win the project.

The Problem

Here, the problem was about plenty. The source of production data was from six different systems:

  • Production Planning data from SAP

  • Real-Time Location Tracking System to locate the Components on the shopfloor work area zones.

  • Quality Management System where the automated QC Tests are running

  • 3 other internal systems to provide information linked to production. It was a case of Information Technology(IT) & Operation Technology (OT) integration on a single plane. RFID locations sensing data is being pushed in at 300 milliseconds. The delay of real-time information should not exceed 3 seconds.

Our Solution

We decided to employ an agent framework to allow all disparate systems to communicate via messaging. We chose RabbitMQ for it.

The frontend user interface as demanded had to be interactive yet handle complex states based on user choices and information feeds received. React JS was the best shot.

We also had to build an interactive floorplan with various visual elements rendered on top of it. We built an NPM library extending D3.js to do the job.

We won the project over few established companies as we demonstrated a working model fitting exactly to the user needs.

Currently, the system is running LIVE at 3 locations – 2 in The USA, 1 in Singapore. The production monitoring system is enabling production managers monitor and organise production function remotely.

Technology Stack

React Js, D3.js, RabbitMQ, APIgee, .NET