Mactan Textile Mill Production MES

The challenge

Before

A Mactan-based textile mill running 220 machines across weaving, dyeing, and finishing was managing production with paper job tickets, a whiteboard in the supervisor office, and a daily 6:00 AM huddle. They knew within a few hours when a machine had stopped, but they did not know why, and downtime root causes were debated in retrospect at week-end. Quality rejects were tallied at the end of the dye run, often after thousands of meters had already been produced off-spec.

• Paper job tickets walked between shop-floor stations by runners
• Whiteboard in supervisor office as the only live production schedule
• Machine downtime causes debated in retrospect at week-end review
• Quality rejects tallied at the end of dye run, after off-spec metres produced
• No live yield, OEE, or throughput visibility for plant management
• Maintenance done reactively when a machine failed mid-shift
• Shift handover by paper logbook with selective attention to detail
• No traceability from finished roll back to specific machine, shift, and operator

The solution

What we built

We built a touchscreen MES for the shop floor with one rugged terminal per work centre. Operators clock onto jobs, log stops with structured reason codes, capture quality samples, and request maintenance from the terminal. Machine PLCs are wired into the platform through Modbus and OPC-UA bridges, so the system knows the moment a loom stops even if the operator has not logged the reason yet — and prompts them to classify it within five minutes. A planning module assigns jobs to machines based on capability and current schedule load. A quality module captures inline samples and triggers a hold on the run if a parameter drifts past tolerance. Maintenance moves from reactive to preventive with PM schedules generated from machine runtime hours. Plant management sees live OEE, yield, and throughput per work centre on a wall screen and per machine on a phone. Every finished roll carries a QR-tagged genealogy back to machine, shift, operator, and quality sample sequence.

How the system flows

1. Production Plan→Machine Assignment→Job Ticket Issued→Operator Clock-on
2. Machine Stop (PLC detected)→Operator Classification→Maintenance Notified
3. Inline Quality Sample→Spec Comparison→Hold or Continue→Audit Log
4. Job Completion→Yield Capture→Genealogy Tag→QR Label Printed
5. PM Schedule→Runtime Hours Threshold→Maintenance Work Order→Sign-off
6. Shift Handover→Open Issues List→Outgoing Sign-off→Incoming Acknowledged
7. OEE Calculation→Live Wall Display→Trend Analytics→Daily Review
8. Quality Reject→Root Cause Workflow→CAPA Owner→Closure

• Finished Roll QR linking back to machine, shift, operator, and quality samples
• Modbus / OPC-UA bridges connecting machine PLCs to the platform