Changeover Tracking allows you to precisely track your Changeover performance, by setting targets based, not just on the Stop Cause, but also the change in product between your batches.

We will first explore the more common and straight-forward use-case before going into the advanced and more complex use-case.

Set your Target

A changeover is really just a regular stop, which has the Batch specific non-operation type.

To add a target to your changeover, open up the Stop Causes list and find and edit your existing Stop Cause, or create a new one:

When the Stop Cause is of type Batch specific non-operation you can open the Changeover Target section to set up your target times.

For now, we will only set up a constant time for the target to get going quickly. We will get into more advanced usage later in Advanced Usage: Target Based on Product.

You are now ready to start tracking your changeovers! Let's jump to the next section on how to start using these Stop Causes.

Register Changeover

Registering your changeover will seem very familiar because we are merely building on top of the Stop Registration flow you are already used to.

Select your stop as you normally would, and click on the Stop Cause matching the changeover you are starting.

Because a changeover is a transition from one batch to another batch, we ask you to confirm the batches. We give you the most sensible default selection we can, from what we know, but allow you to change it if your production plan has changed in the meantime.

💡 If you make a mistake, don't worry! As with a regular Stop Registration, you can edit it afterward to correct the data.

If the changeover you just registered is ongoing, then a countdown will be displayed on several pages such as Register Stops, Batch Dashboard, and Shift Dashboard.

In case your changeover spans multiple registrations, we add their durations to the same countdown, if they are inside the selected timespan.

💡 For a detailed explanation of how we select the default batches, check out Behind the scenes: Selecting default batches.

Analytics for Changeovers

We have set up our targets and registered our changeovers, bringing us to the next step: working with the data.

Go to the Analytics tab, and switch to the Changeover: Grouped using average analytics using the dropdown menu.

To read the changeover columns, they are divided into the following:

• If there's a red bar, it means that the changeover was behind the target. The yellow part of the column will correspond to the target time, and the full column is the realized time.
• If there's a green bar, it means the changeover was ahead of the target. The yellow part of the column will correspond to the realized time.

In the grouped view, we focus on the average changeover time, showing the number of changeovers, and error bars showing the variance between the fastest and slowest changeover.

The table below the Pareto chart shows the detailed information about the changeovers, such as which product the changed from and to, the performance, how many changeovers were merged, etc.

We can change to an ungrouped view using the dropdown again and choosing Changeovers: Ungrouped.

Here we can see the performance of each changeover. If you hover over a column, both in the grouped and ungrouped view, you can see more information.

Counting changeovers

You may have been wondering "How can there be multiple changeovers in a changeover?" which is indeed a good question!

We make sure to count changeover registrations with the same Stop Cause + Previous Batch + Next Batch as the same changeover.

So if you end up having a technical stop in the middle of your changeover process, we make sure to count the two changeover registrations as the same changeover, and calculate the realized time as the sum of the duration of these two individual changeover registrations. You can still see how many registrations happened in the No. of changeovers column.

This forms the basis of Changeover Tracking. If you want to know more, then continue on to our Advanced Usage section.

Advanced Usage

Often a changeover target will be heavily dependent on the product transition that is happening. A constant target is a good start, but as you get more familiar with tracking changeovers you might want to be more specific with your targets.

To support these kinds of use-cases, we provide the ability to annotate products with additional data, which can then be used to calculate the Changeover Target based on which product you are coming from and going to.

Product Parameters

The first step is to set up your product parameters on the products you want to use this on.

Go into the Batches tab and Manage Products. Click on the edit button for the product you are changing.

You will see a section called Product parameters, which is where we will add our parameters that affect our Changeover Target. You can add as many as you want that are relevant to your process.

Below we have set up two products with different parameters. This information could also be automatically filled out by your ERP system.

Target Based on Product

Now that our products are set up, we can define how our Changeover Target should be affect based on the change in product.

Go to your Stop Causes list and edit your changeover Stop Cause. Previously we only added a Constant Time, but this time we will add targets for each parameter by clicking on the + icon and filling out the information.

We ask for three things:

• The name of the product parameter we need to check.
• The target time that should be added if there is a change to the product parameter.
• Optionally, tell us to skip adding this time to the target, if the Unless parameter you specify has already been added to the target.

Along with the Constant Time, we can now calculate the target depending on your product transition.

Example Calculation

Using the above setup, let's take a look at how the target is calculated by hovering over the target time when performing a changeover registration.

We can see that it added a Constant Time and detected a change in the Carton size, Hotmelt, and Carton height parameters. You might notice that Carton height is not included, which is because we specified it should skip adding it to the target if Carton size was already added.

Behind the scenes

Behind the scenes of the Changeover Tracking feature, we make some decisions to give you an optimal user experience, while still keeping you in control of the final decision.

This section is a bit technical, and not something that's necessary to understand to use Changeover Tracking. Nonetheless, we still include it here for full transparency of how the feature works.

Selecting default batches

To make the changeover registration process as easy as possible, we provide some heuristics to select the most likely batch you are transitioning from and to.

We select the previous/next batch based on the following (from here refers to the selected stop's start time):

1. If from is inside a batch:

   • a. Find the halfway point in the batch (if its running, use the expected speed to calculate it).
   • b. If from is in the first half, set the batch from is inside as the default next batch.
   • c. If from is in the second half, set the batch from is inside as the default previous batch.

2. If from is not inside a batch:

   • a. Choose the nearest batch before from.
   • b. If there are no batches before from, return undefined for the default previous batch.

An example of the logic applied:

          Batch1                        Batch2                                  Batch3
|-----------------------|        |----------------------|            |---------------------------|
                    ^                                      ^            ^
                    └CO1                                   └CO2         └CO3

In the example, we have three batches and three changeovers (COs). Using our heuristics we get the following results:

• CO1 hits case 1b: Previous batch = Batch1 and Next batch = Batch2
• CO2 hits case 2a: Previous batch = Batch2 and Next batch = Batch3
• CO3 hits case 1c: Previous batch = Batch2 and Next batch = Batch3

Combining changeover registrations

To be able to combine the changeovers together, we need to make sure that we have the full picture so that we don't lose a part of the changeover because the selected time did not include it.

We expand the selected time by going through the following steps (from and to refer to the times that were originally requested, and actualStop and actualStart refer to the batch's start and stop time):

1. Find the closest batch with an actualStop before the from time.
   • a. If no batch is found but from is inside a batch, choose this batch.
   • b. If no batch is found at all, retain the from time and skip 2.
2. Expand the from time to be the actualStart time the batch from 1.
3. Find the closest batch with an actualStart after the to time.
   • a. If no batch is found but to is inside a batch, choose this batch.
   • b. If no batch is found at all, retain the to time and skip 4.
4. Expand the to time to be the actualStop time of this batch.

An example of the logic applied:

Batch1                        Batch2                                  Batch3                                   Batch4                        Batch5
|-----------------------|        |----------------------|            |---------------------------|            |---------------------------|  |---------------------------|
                    ^                ^ ^                   ^            ^                  ^         ^           ^
^                   └CO1             | └CO2                └CO3         └CO4               └CO5      |           └CO6                     ^
|                                    |                                                               |                                    |
|                                    +---------------------------------------------------------------+                                    |
|                                                          Original time selection                                                        |
|                                                                                                                                         |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                     Expanded time selection

In our Original time selection we have CO2, CO3, and CO5, giving us the issues:

1. ❌ - CO2 and CO1 could potentially need to be combined, but CO1 is missing in our original selection.
2. ✅ - CO3 and CO4 could potentially need to be combined and are both included in our original selection.
3. ❌ - CO5 and CO6 could potentially need to be combined, but CO6 is missing in our original selection.

To solve this issue we expand the time selection to make sure we always have all the data needed to determine what we need to do in cases 1, 2, and 3.