Industry solution

Manufacturing

Run the plant on one connected picture, from schedule to shipped part

Scheduling, quality, maintenance, crews, freight and emissions, run by specialist products designed to share plant facts on one workspace.

Products
8
Challenges
6
Concepts
15
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Machining plant at shift change with a production schedule on a tablet and tagged pallets of finished parts
ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)AssetHandler(opens AssetHandler in a new tab)MoveTheWheels(opens MoveTheWheels in a new tab)CrewFoundry(opens CrewFoundry in a new tab)EcoImpactHub(opens EcoImpactHub in a new tab)FluidGrids(opens FluidGrids in a new tab)BigConsole(opens BigConsole in a new tab)Botlit(opens Botlit in a new tab)

The problem

Why running a plant is hard right now

Plants lose hours and margin in the gaps between systems: the schedule does not know the truck is late, maintenance does not know which machine is the bottleneck, and quality cannot see where the suspect lot went.

Most small and mid-sized plants run on a patchwork. Orders live in the ERP, the schedule in a planner's spreadsheet, shift assignments on a whiteboard, maintenance in a separate system or on paper, quality records in binders and travelers, and freight status in carrier emails. Each tool is right about its own slice and blind to the others, so the plant learns about a late truck, a failing spindle or an expired sign-off from whoever happens to notice first.

The pressure comes from every side. Customers want shorter lead times and dependable ship dates, and increasingly expect lot-level traceability, fast containment when something escapes, and carbon data for the parts they buy. Material arrivals are harder to predict. Experienced operators and maintenance technicians are retiring with knowledge that was never written down, and thin margins leave little room for a sprawling enterprise suite or an in-house integration team.

This page describes a solution concept: how specialist Burdenoff products are designed to pass plant facts to one another on Burdenoff Workspaces, so that a signal in one place becomes a clear action in another. The products are pre-launch, and the hand-offs shown here describe how they are designed to work together.

Who this is for

  • Plant manager

    Hitting the weekly ship plan with the crew and machines on hand, and walking into the tier meeting with numbers everyone trusts.

  • Production planner and scheduler

    A finite-capacity schedule that reflects late material, rush orders and downtime before the floor finds out the hard way.

  • Quality manager

    Catching drift before it becomes scrap, and scoping containment by lot and location within hours when a customer complaint lands.

  • Maintenance and reliability lead

    Keeping the bottleneck running, fitting PMs around production and making a defensible repair-or-replace case for aging equipment.

  • Production supervisor and shift lead

    Starting every shift with a qualified operator on each station and a clear handover of what went wrong overnight.

  • Sustainability and energy manager

    Answering customer carbon questionnaires with metered energy and emissions per part rather than estimates pieced together from utility bills.

A day in the life

The story behind the solution

A week at Brackwater Components

Brackwater Components machines and assembles hydraulic valve bodies and manifolds for makers of agricultural and construction equipment, and anodizes and powder-coats housings in batches at a smaller sister plant. Renata Silva runs the main plant: three shifts, a cell of horizontal machining centers that nearly every part flows through, and customers who want shorter lead times, tighter traceability and, lately, carbon data. This is one ordinary, difficult week, and how the products on this page are designed to change it.

  1. Monday, 6:10 a.m.

    The bar stock is not coming Tuesday

    Renata's week starts at the tier-one board beside the machining cell. Planner Arun Mehta has built the schedule around an order of VB-220 valve bodies due to a tractor maker on Thursday. At 6:10 purchasing forwards a carrier email: the aluminum bar stock is stuck at a cross-dock and will now arrive Wednesday afternoon. Arun has a printed Gantt chart and no quick way to see which other orders need that bar, or what the machining centers could run instead.

    How this is solved: Keep the schedule honest when material runs late

  2. Tuesday, 2:40 a.m.

    HMC-04 stops again on night shift

    Night supervisor Emeka Obi logs a spindle overtemperature alarm on HMC-04, the machining center every valve body passes through. It is the third stop this month. The one technician who knows the machine's quirks works days. By morning the stop is a line on a shift report, and Renata is asked the same question finance asked last quarter: keep repairing it, or budget for a replacement?

    How this is solved: Keep the bottleneck running, and know when to replace it

  3. Wednesday, 10:15 a.m.

    A customer finds oversize bores

    The tractor maker's supplier quality engineer writes that bores on last week's VB-220 valve bodies measure oversize at incoming inspection. They want containment actions today and an 8D report to follow. Quality manager Ines Carvalho needs to know which lots are affected and where every unit is: the finished-goods store, the Hollins partner warehouse, the dock, the truck that left at 7 a.m. Then someone remembers that the bore gauge on cell 2 was due for calibration last month.

    How this is solved: Contain a quality escape by lot and location in hours

  4. Thursday, 5:30 a.m.

    Two call-outs before first shift

    Two operators qualified on the leak test station call in sick. Shift lead Ignacio Vela stands at a whiteboard skills matrix last updated in the spring, trying to remember who was signed off on leak test and whose forklift certification has lapsed. Hana Novak, a newer operator, is keen but only partway through her leak test sign-off, and asks where the current torque sequence for the manifold end cap is, because the binder at the station holds two revisions.

    How this is solved: Put a qualified operator on every station, every shift

  5. Friday, 9:00 a.m.

    The carbon questionnaire is due

    The same customer's sustainability team sends its annual supplier questionnaire, asking for the plant's Scope 1 and 2 emissions and the energy behind each part it buys. Renata has a year of utility bills in a shared folder, a compressor-room sub-meter nobody reads, and good-part counts in another system. The electricity bill also jumped last month, and nobody can say whether it was the new wash line, the compressors or weekend idling.

    How this is solved: Answer the customer's carbon questions with plant data

  6. Friday, 3:00 p.m.

    Two plants, two versions of OEE

    At the weekly operations review, VP of Operations Tobias Lindqvist compares both plants. Plant 1 counts changeovers as planned downtime; Plant 2 does not. One site reports scrap in pieces, the other in dollars. Half the hour goes to reconciling spreadsheets exported that morning, and the week's real story, late material, a sick machine and a quality escape, gets told as anecdotes.

    How this is solved: One trusted view of plant performance for the weekly review

By the next Monday the plant has the same machines, the same people and the same customers. What changes, in this concept, is that each disruption arrives as a record in the right product, in front of the right person, while there is still time to act, and Friday's review argues about decisions instead of numbers.

Challenges and how they are solved

6 problems, several products, one connected answer

Each challenge shows the problem as it happens, how the products are designed to hand work to each other, and the concepts that illustrate it. Share any challenge on its own.

Challenge 1 of 6

Keep the schedule honest when material runs late

ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)MoveTheWheels(opens MoveTheWheels in a new tab)FluidGrids(opens FluidGrids in a new tab)

The problem

A finite schedule is only as good as its assumptions, and the biggest one is that material arrives when the purchase order says it will. When a supplier load slips, the news usually lands in a buyer's inbox as a carrier notice, not on the schedule. The planner then walks bills of materials by hand to find which production orders need that material, while the bottleneck keeps running whatever was next in the queue, including jobs that could have waited. The order that needed the late material loses its slot, the floor starts expediting mid-week, changeovers multiply and a committed ship date slides without anyone deciding that it should.

What it costs

Late material turns into idle bottleneck hours, extra changeovers, premium freight and missed ship dates, and the planner loses a day rebuilding a schedule the floor had already stopped trusting.

How the products work together

When the carrier's revised ETA is posted to the inbound shipment in MoveTheWheels, by the carrier or by a FluidGrids automation that reads the carrier notice, MoveTheWheels is designed to raise it as an at-risk exception. A FluidGrids automation is designed to pick up that exception, match the material to open production orders through the ManufacturedOps bill of materials and material requirements, and post a material-risk flag on each affected order. The ManufacturedOps schedule board is designed to show the late load as a marker on the Gantt chart, the orders it would starve and a suggested resequence that pulls forward work whose material is already on hand. The planner accepts or rejects it, so the schedule, not an inbox, becomes where the disruption is managed.

The outcome it is designed for

The planner replans the same morning, the bottleneck keeps running work it has material for, and customer service gets a realistic ship date days before the old one would have been missed.

The concepts behind it

Challenge 2 of 6

Keep the bottleneck running, and know when to replace it

ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)AssetHandler(opens AssetHandler in a new tab)

The problem

On many plants one machine sets the pace for everything downstream. When it stops at night on a spindle alarm, the supervisor resets it, notes the stop on a shift report and moves on, and the technician who knows the machine hears about it hours later. Each stop looks minor on its own, so nobody lines the alarms up against the machine's creeping spindle load and temperature. When finance asks whether to fund another repair or budget for a replacement, the answer rests on memory rather than on a maintenance history with costs attached.

What it costs

Unplanned stops on a constraint machine cost output for the whole plant, not just one cell, and capital decisions on aging equipment get made on anecdote.

How the products work together

ManufacturedOps records each stop as a downtime event with a reason and duration, takes the machine's spindle load and temperature over MQTT, and its OEE andon is designed to rank the losses so the bottleneck's breakdowns stand out. It also runs line-side maintenance work orders and is designed to fit preventive jobs around the schedule, while AssetHandler holds the enterprise record for the same machine: cost history, depreciation and total cost of ownership. The spindle load and temperature trend, downtime events with failure codes and run hours (for MTBF and MTTR) are designed to flow to that AssetHandler record. Its predictive maintenance view is designed to rank failure risk and propose a work order, which is designed to pass back to ManufacturedOps so preventive scheduling can place it in a gap on the finite-capacity board. Its repair-or-replace view weighs book value and ownership cost against keeping the machine, giving the capital review one evidence-backed case.

The outcome it is designed for

Maintenance plans service around the schedule instead of reacting at 2 a.m., and the replacement question is answered with the machine's full cost, condition and downtime history.

The concepts behind it

Challenge 3 of 6

Contain a quality escape by lot and location in hours

ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)MoveTheWheels(opens MoveTheWheels in a new tab)AssetHandler(opens AssetHandler in a new tab)FluidGrids(opens FluidGrids in a new tab)

The problem

A customer's incoming inspection rejects parts from a recent shipment and asks for containment actions the same day. The quality team starts with a nonconformance report, then paper travelers, then the shipping log, trying to work out which lots are suspect and where the finished goods now sit: some in the plant's own store, some at a partner warehouse, some staged on a dock, some already on a truck. Then a second question surfaces. If a measuring gauge drifted out of calibration, every lot it passed since its last good check is suspect too, and nobody can list those lots quickly.

What it costs

Every hour of uncertain scope risks more suspect parts shipping, a wider customer sort at the plant's expense and an 8D response built on guesses about root cause.

How the products work together

In ManufacturedOps, quality selects every production lot whose bore operation ran on cell 2 or was inspected with gauge GA-0142 since its calibration due date, genealogy traces them forward to finished-goods lots, and the NCR records the disposition. Each inspection record is designed to carry the gauge's asset tag, letting AssetHandler's calibration register list the inspections and released lots since the gauge's last good calibration, so quality can adjust the scope with evidence. A FluidGrids automation is designed to route the scope to MoveTheWheels. Finished-goods lot numbers are designed to travel from ManufacturedOps onto MoveTheWheels stock and shipment lines (on the advance shipment notice at receiving and putaway), so the hold targets lots, not just SKUs: allocation is blocked, the in-transit load is flagged for intercept and delivered orders are listed for notice. When quality signs off the NCR, the same automation is designed to release the hold lot by lot.

The outcome it is designed for

The customer receives a containment plan by lot and location the same day, and the 8D starts from a documented trail rather than a search through travelers.

The concepts behind it

Challenge 4 of 6

Put a qualified operator on every station, every shift

CrewFoundry(opens CrewFoundry in a new tab)ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)Botlit(opens Botlit in a new tab)

The problem

Before a shift starts, two call-outs leave a station short. The skills matrix lives on a whiteboard that drifts out of date between audits, so choosing cover means remembering who is signed off, whose forklift certification has lapsed and who is already near their overtime limit. Newer operators are keen but partway through their sign-offs, and at the station they work from binders where a superseded revision of a work instruction can sit beside the current one, so the right torque sequence depends on which page someone opens.

What it costs

Gaps get filled by whoever is nearby, sign-offs expire unnoticed, experienced operators burn out on overtime, and new hires learn from memory instead of released instructions.

How the products work together

ManufacturedOps is designed to publish the day's shift plan: which production orders run and which stations must be staffed. CrewFoundry is designed to read that plan against its skills graph and certificates and show, station by station, who is qualified, who can run with support and whose sign-off is about to expire. When call-outs land, it is designed to propose qualified cover from the people on shift and their hours so far that week for the shift lead to approve, and a completed sign-off is designed to update the matrix. The approved roster is designed to return to ManufacturedOps so operators clock on only at stations they are qualified for. Released revisions from the ManufacturedOps document library are designed to sync into a Botlit knowledge base, retiring superseded ones, and a Botlit agent is designed to answer operator questions from them, cite the revision it used and say plainly when nothing matches.

The outcome it is designed for

Every station starts the shift with a qualified operator and a known backup, sign-offs are renewed before they lapse, and new operators work from the current revision.

The concepts behind it

Challenge 5 of 6

Answer the customer's carbon questions with plant data

EcoImpactHub(opens EcoImpactHub in a new tab)AssetHandler(opens AssetHandler in a new tab)ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)FluidGrids(opens FluidGrids in a new tab)

The problem

A key customer's supplier questionnaire asks for the plant's Scope 1 and 2 emissions and the energy behind each part it buys, often on a short deadline. Most plants can produce a year of utility totals and little else: a sub-meter or two that nobody trends, production counts held in a different system and no agreed way to split a plant-wide bill across product families. When a monthly bill spikes, nobody can tell whether a new line, compressors running through a weekend or an oven idling between loads caused it.

What it costs

Estimated answers put customer trust and future sourcing at risk, while the energy lost to idle running and compressed-air leaks keeps showing up on the bill.

How the products work together

With sub-meters added on the wash line and heat-treat oven, a FluidGrids automation is designed to collect utility and sub-meter readings on a schedule, plus HMC-04's power draw from the machine readings ManufacturedOps takes over MQTT. EcoImpactHub is designed to record each reading as a scoped ledger entry with a sourced emission factor, tagged to the asset in the AssetHandler register, so the same figures appear on each machine's AssetHandler record. The automation is designed to pass good-unit counts, run hours per work center by product family and scheduled production hours from ManufacturedOps, so EcoImpactHub can allocate metered energy to product families by run hours and flag energy used outside scheduled production. At the sister plant, which anodizes and powder-coats in batches, the gas-fired cure oven is the main Scope 1 source and energy is allocated per batch. Every figure traces to meter, factor and period, ready to feed the customer's Scope 3 purchased-goods footprint.

The outcome it is designed for

The questionnaire is answered from traceable plant data, and maintenance gets a ranked list of energy losses to chase, starting with idle running and leaks.

The concepts behind it

Challenge 6 of 6

One trusted view of plant performance for the weekly review

ManufacturedOps(opens ManufacturedOps in a new tab)FluidGrids(opens FluidGrids in a new tab)BigConsole(opens BigConsole in a new tab)MoveTheWheels(opens MoveTheWheels in a new tab)EcoImpactHub(opens EcoImpactHub in a new tab)

The problem

Every plant in a network tends to grow its own definitions. Whether changeovers count against availability, whether scrap is reported as units or as cost, where a shift's numbers are cut off: small choices that make two OEE figures impossible to compare. Each site brings its own export to the weekly review, the first half hour goes to reconciliation, and the week's real events, late material, a failing machine, a quality escape, are told as stories. The actions agreed in the room live in someone's notebook until the next review.

What it costs

Leaders make capacity, staffing and capital calls on numbers that are late, inconsistent and hard to question, and the same problems come back week after week.

How the products work together

ManufacturedOps compares plants on production KPIs. FluidGrids workflows are designed to pull OEE, scrap and downtime from each plant's ManufacturedOps records, on-time delivery from MoveTheWheels and emissions from EcoImpactHub on a schedule, apply one set of definitions and push the results into keyed BigConsole data sinks, so freight and emissions sit beside the production numbers. BigConsole turns those sinks into a multi-plant console with the same filters and drill-downs for every site, and its Explain panel is designed to summarize what changed this week, citing the data sink and field behind each finding. When the review agrees an action, a FluidGrids follow-up workflow is designed to open it as a CAPA in ManufacturedOps with an owner and due date, so the next review starts from the open actions.

The outcome it is designed for

The review starts from one set of definitions across plants, time shifts from reconciling numbers to deciding actions, and each agreed action is designed to land in ManufacturedOps as a CAPA with an owner and a trail.

The concepts behind it

How it fits together

How it fits together across one plant week

Follow one week of disruption through the products. Each step is one product doing its part, and each is designed to hand a concrete record to the next, from a late truck on Monday to the Friday review.

  1. To CrewFoundry: Revised shift plan listing the stations each run must staff

  2. To ManufacturedOps: Approved station roster, so operators clock on only where they are qualified

  3. To MoveTheWheels: Recall scope as a finished-goods lot list, designed to be routed by a FluidGrids automation

  4. To ManufacturedOps: Hold status per location, released lot by lot after quality signs off the NCR

  5. To EcoImpactHub: Asset register tags that each energy reading is recorded against

  6. To FluidGrids: Verified energy and emissions per unit by product family

  7. To BigConsole: Refreshed plant datasets built on one set of definitions

Step 1 of 8: Replan around the late load

Products in this solution

What each product brings

  • ManufacturedOps

    Plant core: schedule, floor, quality, line maintenance, OEE

    Designed as a modern MES for plants of roughly 50 to 500 people: finite-capacity scheduling, operator terminals, SPC, NCR and CAPA, lot genealogy, line-side maintenance and downtime-driven OEE, captured at source so the other products can work from the same production facts.

    Visit ManufacturedOpsAll concepts

  • AssetHandler

    Enterprise asset record, predictive care and calibration

    The enterprise record behind each machine and gauge: cost history, depreciation and total cost of ownership, with calibration and predictive risk designed in, alongside ManufacturedOps line-side work orders and energy figures drawn from EcoImpactHub.

    Visit AssetHandlerAll concepts

  • MoveTheWheels

    Inbound and outbound logistics control tower

    Tracks supplier loads, customer shipments, warehouse stock and exceptions, and is designed to carry finished-goods lot numbers, so late material and suspect finished goods are visible where the trucks and pallets actually are.

    Visit MoveTheWheelsAll concepts

  • CrewFoundry

    Frontline skills, certificates and shift cover

    Keeps the skills graph, learning paths and certificates for every operator, and is designed to match them to the stations each shift must staff, including cover when call-outs land (shift rosters and the mobile app are on its roadmap).

    Visit CrewFoundryAll concepts

  • EcoImpactHub

    Energy, carbon ledger and customer disclosures

    Turns metered energy and fuel into Scope 1 and 2 ledger entries with sourced emission factors, reduction targets and framework-tagged reports, with each line traceable to its source for customers and auditors.

    Visit EcoImpactHubAll concepts

  • FluidGrids

    Automation that moves signals between products

    Visual workflows are designed to route exceptions, holds and meter readings between these products; its documented Burdenoff hand-off today is the BigConsole data sink node, which is designed to feed live consoles on a schedule.

    Visit FluidGridsAll concepts

  • BigConsole

    Multi-plant performance console

    Governed consoles with filters and drill-down give operations leaders one view of every plant, designed to add cited 'what changed' explanations and row-level security so each site sees only its own rows.

    Visit BigConsoleAll concepts

  • Botlit

    Grounded assistant for the floor and the office

    Agents are designed to answer from the plant's own documents with citations, can query BigConsole figures and trigger FluidGrids workflows, and are governed by workspace policy definitions and a full execution ledger.

    Visit BotlitAll concepts

One platform underneath: Burdenoff Workspaces

Every product here runs on Burdenoff Workspaces: one sign-on for planners, operators and leaders, role-based access designed to be scoped per plant, one audit trail across schedule changes, holds and approvals, and one bill for every product the plant uses.

Concept gallery

Every concept in this solution

15 concepts from 8 products. Each one links to its own page on the product's website, and every view has a link you can share.

Pitch kit

The Manufacturing solution in one minute

When a truck runs late, a spindle starts to fail or a gauge drifts, most plants find out from whoever happens to notice first. Burdenoff brings ManufacturedOps for scheduling, execution, quality and OEE together with AssetHandler, CrewFoundry, MoveTheWheels and EcoImpactHub, connected by FluidGrids and read through BigConsole and Botlit, so each disruption is designed to become an action in the right hands the same day.

  • A late inbound load is designed to show up on the production schedule with a resequence to approve, not in a forwarded email.
  • Bottleneck downtime and spindle condition are designed to flow into asset history, failure-risk scoring and a repair-or-replace case.
  • A suspect lot is traced through genealogy and designed to be held across warehouses, docks and trucks, lot by lot.
  • Shift cover is designed to match qualified operators, and new hires get answers from released work instructions only.
  • Energy and emissions per part are designed to come from meters, run hours and production counts, ready for customer questionnaires.
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Questions

Frequently asked

Do we have to replace our ERP?

No. ManufacturedOps is designed to sit between the ERP and the floor. Today it offers a GraphQL API and one accounting-system connector that syncs inventory items both ways; two-way sync of orders, BOMs and confirmations, and connectors for other ERPs, are on its roadmap. The ERP stays the system of record for finance and customer orders; the plant products look after what happens on the floor, in maintenance and in the warehouse.

Can we start with one product and add others later?

Yes. Each product works on its own inside a Burdenoff workspace. A natural starting point is ManufacturedOps on one bottleneck line, or AssetHandler for the enterprise asset record. Because the products share one identity, permission model and audit trail, adding CrewFoundry, MoveTheWheels or EcoImpactHub later extends the same workspace instead of creating another silo.

Does this work for batch and process plants, not just machining?

The story on this page follows a discrete machining plant, with a batch-anodizing sister plant in the energy challenge, and the building blocks carry over. ManufacturedOps models work centers, routings, material lots and genealogy for batch production; AssetHandler covers tanks, pumps, ovens and instruments; EcoImpactHub handles fuel and electricity for boilers, kilns and dryers. Recipe management and continuous process control are not what these products are built for today.

How do machines connect?

ManufacturedOps is designed to take machine tag readings over MQTT, with OPC UA and direct PLC connectivity on its roadmap. Where a machine cannot report on its own, operators are designed to record counts, scrap and downtime reasons on touch terminals at the station, so OEE and genealogy still start from data captured at the source.

Can each plant keep its own data separate?

Yes. Every record belongs to a workspace, roles are designed to be scoped per plant, and BigConsole is designed to apply row-level security so a plant manager sees their own site while operations leadership sees every site. Changes across the products land in one audit trail.

Is all of this available today?

Burdenoff's products are pre-launch and in active development. This page is a solution concept: it shows how the products are designed to work together, and several hand-offs described here are design intent rather than finished integrations. We are glad to walk through what exists today and what is on each product's roadmap.

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This is a solution concept: it shows how Burdenoff products are designed to work together in this industry. The images are illustrations of the concepts, not screenshots of the actual products, and every name and figure in them is sample data.