Production scheduling
Planning Orders and Pieces: the
Graphical Plan Board
With KnitMaster, the planner conducts his demanding job by
means of an electronic plan board. Similar to the manual plan
board on the wall, the planner can easily assign production orders
to the available machines. Integrated with the style database
and the monitoring system, the plan board software automati-
cally calculates the exact time for every order and actualizes it
based on real time information such as actual speed, efficiency
and stop level.
The KnitMaster scheduling software supports planning of indi-
vidual pieces as well as orders, expressed in kilos. Orders and
pieces to be produced can be down loaded from the company’s
host computer or can be manually entered into the KnitMaster
system.
By means of simple “drag and drop” functions, the planner
can allocate pieces or orders to machines, re-schedule or as-
sign them to another machine, etc..: the system calculates the
consequences on the spot.
Target Roll Length Control
The target roll length can be downloaded to the data unit at
the machine. Upon reaching the length, the data unit can stop
the machine and activate a doffing lamp to inform the operator
that the machine is waiting for doffing.
Piece Weighing
After knitting, each individual piece is often weighed before it
is transferred to the warehouse or to the next operation. The
scales are connected to the KnitMaster system by means of a
data unit with serial interface. The piece is identified by means of
a barcode scanner or by manual entry on the data unit keyboard.
The data unit automatically reads the weight and transfers it to
the KnitMaster data base and from there on to the company’s
host computer.
Printing of Piece Labels
From the plan board, the user has access to the style specifica-
tions data base with all style related technical details. Based
on the machine loading and the information available in the
style data base, the KnitMaster system can print the barcoded
piece tickets.