Si-Floor
The traveller stops being paper.
Clock on, program, setup, run, inspect — every routing step captured as it happens, with run time read off the control itself.
Nobody reconstructs the shift at five o’clock, so the hours on the job are the hours that happened.
The pain
Everybody knows the times are wrong. Nobody has time to fix them.
The numbers on the traveller are written down at the end of the day by somebody remembering the morning.
Written from memory
Setup was “about an hour.” Run was “call it three.” The quote that comes off that is a guess built on a guess.
Keyed in twice
Once on paper at the machine, once into the system by somebody in the office who was not there.
So nobody trusts it
And once the numbers are not trusted, the next estimate goes back to being somebody’s instinct.
How it works
Five steps, and the machine fills in the hard one.
Clock on is signing in
Not a second system to log into. The operator picks up the job and the record starts.
The machine reports itself
Where the control speaks it, run time, cycle count, feeds and spindle load come off the machine natively. Where it does not, a sensor reports state and cycles instead.
Inspection on the step
First piece, in-process and final sign-off live on the routing step, under the name of whoever did it.
The difference
One record, not a handoff between two vendors.
Shops do close this loop today — with a monitoring platform bolted to an ERP, or a quoting tool importing times from a monitoring tool. It works, and it costs you two subscriptions, an integration and a reconciliation nobody owns.
Here the routing step is the traveller, the labour record, the machine record and the quoting input, all at once, because there is only one of it. Op 30 ran 0.39 hours a piece against 0.32 quoted. That one fact lands on the job cost, on the margin, on the schedule and on what Si-Q prices the next one at — without crossing a system boundary where it could be lost, delayed or disagreed with.
The operator
Your machinists are not the problem you are solving.
Nobody in this market will say this out loud, so we will: a system that feels like surveillance gets worked around, and then your data is worse than the paper was.
Two clicks at the machine, and the rest comes off the control. The point is not to watch a man work — it is to stop asking him to remember at five o’clock what he did at nine, and to put his name on the work he actually did. The night shift gets its own numbers rather than being averaged into somebody else’s.
Your iron
The thirty-year-old machine still makes money.
Half the floor in a shop like yours predates the protocols, and a system that only works on new machines is a system that only works on half your shop.
Where a control speaks MTConnect or OPC UA, it is read natively and the detail is rich — cycle time, part count, feeds, spindle load. Where it does not, a sensor on the machine reports state and cycles, and the operator supplies what the machine cannot. Either way the step is captured and the hours are real. Send us your machine list and we will tell you which of yours falls where before you buy anything.
Straight answers
Questions people ask about Si-Floor.
What is shop floor data collection?
Capturing what actually happened on each operation — who ran it, on which machine, for how long, how many good parts and what stopped it — as the work happens, rather than writing it on a traveller and keying it in later.
What is MTConnect?
An open standard that lets a machine control publish what it is doing — running, idle, alarmed, cycle times, part counts and in many cases feeds and spindle load. OPC UA is the other common standard. Where a control supports either, the data comes straight off the machine with nobody typing it.
Will it work on my older machines?
Yes, at a different level of detail. A modern control reports natively and richly. An older machine is read by a sensor that reports machine state and cycles, with the operator supplying what the control cannot. Send your machine list and we will tell you exactly what each one will report.
Do operators have to enter a lot of data?
No. Clocking onto the job is the sign-in, and the machine reports its own run time. What a person adds is the judgement a machine cannot have — the reason it stopped, the inspection result, the scrap.
Does this replace our paper travellers?
Yes. The routing step on screen is the traveller, carrying the print, the revision, the inspection requirements and the sign-offs, so there is one copy and it is current.
What happens to the hours after the job closes?
They post to job cost as the labour, they correct the margin on that job, and they become what Si-Q prices the next job like it from. That is the loop the whole system runs on.
Send us your machine list.
Thirty minutes on a shop set up like yours. Tell us what you are running and we will show you what each machine would report.