A-FMDS: System Overview
A 10,000-foot view of ProAlert's closed-loop daily management system
A 10,000-foot view of ProAlert's closed-loop daily management system
A-FMDS (the Automated Floor Management Development System) is ProAlert Core's daily management spine: the connective tissue that turns a collection of strong but separate modules (telemetry, CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), scrap and downtime tracking, RCA (Root Cause Analysis), reporting) into one closed-loop execution system. It answers a single question, continuously and automatically:
"Where are we missing the mark right now, and who is doing what, by when, to fix it?"
The name reads exactly as it works. FMDS (Floor Management Daily System) is the established lean-manufacturing discipline: the daily rhythm a plant uses to review targets, surface the gaps against them, and drive each gap to closure with clear ownership. The leading "A" is Automated. That is what ProAlert adds. ProAlert already sees the floor in real time, so it can detect the gap, raise the problem, route it, escalate it, and capture the learning without anyone re-keying data into a whiteboard.
Gap → Problem → Action flow that
every detection source feeds and every screen consumesA scrap-rate breach, a sensor alarm, a missed schedule, a failed inspection, a manually-raised concern: all of them become the same kind of record in A-FMDS. That is the whole point. One place to look, one lifecycle to learn, one audit trail to trust.
FMDS works. The discipline is proven across lean manufacturers worldwide. The gap is not in the methodology; it is in the execution. FMDS without automation depends entirely on the right people doing the right things, at the right time, every shift. When a strong lean leader is present and engaged, the board reflects reality. When that person rotates out, goes on vacation, or moves to another plant, the discipline erodes and the board becomes theatre.
The honest reason most FMDS programs fade is not laziness or bad intent. It is that they ask people to do extra work on top of everything else they are responsible for. Anything extra gets squeezed out when the floor gets busy. Three structural gaps make this predictable:
| The gap | What breaks without automation | How A-FMDS closes it |
|---|---|---|
| No single source of targets | Targets live in spreadsheets, whiteboards, and tribal knowledge. "What good looks like" varies by shift and by supervisor. Nobody agrees on the baseline. | One Target entity covers every scope and metric,
with revisions, effective dates, and approval. Every screen in
the system uses the same number. |
| Gaps surface only when someone raises them | The morning board reflects what the outgoing supervisor remembered to write down. Events that happened overnight when no one was watching go unreported. | Twelve detectors watch continuously, and every one of them
produces the same Gap record the moment an actual
misses its target. Nothing surfaces only when someone chooses to
surface it. The full list is in
Where Gaps come from. |
| Ownership and follow-through are voluntary | Problems scatter across call logs, NCRs (Nonconformance Records), work orders, and verbal hand-offs. Most issues age quietly until the next shift meeting when someone asks again. | One Problem with an enforced lifecycle, one
configurable escalation engine, and a permanent audit trail.
The system chases it so the supervisor does not have to, and
past resolutions stay attached to the problem, so a recurrence
arrives with the previous answer already on it. |
FMDS initiatives fail not because the discipline is wrong but because they rely on people to do it consistently, without error, on top of everything else they are responsible for. Any process that depends on constant human discipline eventually loses to a busy shift. A-FMDS makes the discipline automatic. The system holds regardless of who is on the floor that day.
A-FMDS is a loop, not a list. Every operational issue travels the same path from "we missed" to "we learned," and the learning feeds the next cycle.
Every Gap, Problem, Action, and Escalation carries an append-only event stream: a permanent, ordered record of everything that happened to it. That stream is the audit trail, the basis of reporting, and the fuel for future analytics. Records are written once and never quietly edited.
A-FMDS introduces a small set of new entities. Each is auditable, each carries an event stream, and each is deliberately generic so any source can feed it and any screen can consume it.
| Entity | Purpose | Key fields |
|---|---|---|
| Target | What good looks like for a metric at a scope. Versioned and approved. | Metric, direction, target / warning / critical thresholds, scope, revision |
| Gap | A recorded instance of an actual missing a target. | Gap number, metric, expected, actual, severity, source, status |
| Problem | An operational issue someone is accountable for resolving. | Problem number (PRB-…), category, severity,
priority, owner, status, due date |
| Action | A concrete step taken to resolve a Problem (or other parent). | Action number (ACT-…), type, owner, status,
due date, verification flag |
| Escalation Rule | A timed ladder of "who to notify when this sits too long." | Applies-to type, filters, levels (delay, notify target, channel) |
| Coaching Note Delivered F4 | Structured supervisor coaching tied to a problem or person. | Coachee, anchor, structured prompts |
| LSW (Leader Standard Work) Routine Delivered F4 | A recurring checklist a leader executes. | Items, schedule, execution records |
| Tiered Meeting Delivered F4 | Tier 1 / 2 / 3 huddle with an auto-built agenda from open gaps. | Tier, agenda items, attendees, action links |
A Gap is a measurement: "scrap was 5%, target 2%." A Problem is accountability: "this is mine to fix." Not every gap becomes a problem; a gap is promoted when it needs an owner. One problem can also roll up many recurring gaps.
A Problem is the issue and its owner. An Action is one executable step. A problem usually needs several actions: contain it now, find the root cause, fix it permanently, verify the fix held. Each is separately owned and tracked.
A-FMDS organises everything by category: the lean SQDCP (Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost, People) framework that a daily management board is built around. Every Problem is filed under one of these, so a board can show one row per category and a plant can run its huddle top to bottom.
A-FMDS adds two more categories beyond classic SQDCP, because ProAlert tracks them too: Maintenance (equipment health, work orders) and Kaizen (continuous-improvement ideas). Together they are the complete set of problem categories.
The A-FMDS Daily Board is the screen a plant stands in front of each morning: the live stream of recent gaps and problems, the metric tiles, and the SQDCP grid, one cell per category per working day. Click a red cell and you are looking at that category's gaps and problems for that day. Click a tile and you are on the drill-down described in Drilling into a Metric. The board has a TV mode for the monitor over the line, grid included.
A board tile tells you a number moved. It does not tell you when, where, or what was behind it, and a plant that cannot answer those three questions standing at the board goes back to a spreadsheet. A-FMDS answers them with one path that every metric uses where its source data supports the next level.
| Level | The question it answers | What you are looking at |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Where is this metric for the period? | The board tile, or the SQDCP grid cell for one category and one day. |
| 2 | Which days, weeks or months inside the period drove it? | The trend, at Day, Week, Month, Quarter or Year. Every point is a door to the next level. |
| 3 | Which asset, product or shift produced it? | The breakdown of one point, worst contributor first, with each slice's share of the total and the quantity it was measured over. |
| 4 | Which driver dominates? | The drivers chart and table: a Pareto with a cumulative curve, ranked largest first, with the rows that make up the first 80 percent highlighted. Scrap ranks by reject code or stage; downtime by call type or failure mode. |
| 5 | Did the fix hold? | One driver at Week, Month and Year side by side, with the change over each range and the countermeasures being worked in that category and area. |
The metric screens share a common pattern. What differs is declared on the metric itself: which dimensions it can be split by, which drivers it can be ranked by, and how its daily figures combine into a week or a month. Scrap and downtime split by asset, product and shift. Safety splits by asset and location, because that is what an incident records. OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) opens an Availability, Performance and Quality decomposition at Level 4. Safety ranks coded hazards; external defects split by product or customer and rank reject codes. First-time-through follows first-pass failures through the scrap dimensions. Adding a metric to the board is a declaration, not a new set of pages, which is what keeps the board reading the same way for every category.
A month on the trend is a calendar month and a week starts on Monday. Counting back 30 days from today and calling it "August" would put a bucket labelled August over the middle of two months, so the buckets align to their natural boundary instead. The trend opens at Month, and the range you choose carries through to the breakdown and the drivers below it.
A range or a button the engine cannot honour is not offered, and the page says why. Hourly production trends require a Business Resource; plant-wide production metrics can use shift roll-ups. Safety and external defects remain day-based. Plant-wide OEE is shown at Shift or Day, because an average of daily OEE figures is not a month's OEE; narrow the board to a line and the longer ranges come back, computed from that line's own production time. Scrap is shown as parts per million only where the plant is configured for it and everything produced in the window is counted in units; otherwise it stays a percentage and the page tells you so.
Every level opens from the public board without signing in. Anyone can walk up to the monitor, touch a tile, and follow the path to the countermeasures. People's names appear on that path only when the installation has chosen to publish them; by default the owner column is simply absent on a public screen.
A-FMDS was designed to wrap and link, never to rip out. Existing modules keep doing their jobs; A-FMDS connects them, first by listening to everything that detects a problem, then by linking the records that resolve it.
A-FMDS is deliberately source-agnostic. A Gap is the same record whether it came from a scrap breach, a downtime stretch, a sensor alarm, or a person, so there is one place to look rather than a different screen per source. That matters on the floor: a supervisor learns one board and one workflow, and it holds however the issue was found. Each detector below reads a capability ProAlert Core is already measuring and turns it into a Gap.
| Detection source | What raises a Gap | Status |
|---|---|---|
Scrap threshold breachScrapThreshold |
A sustained scrap rate above its configured limit. | Delivered (F1) |
EdgeSense sensor violationSensorViolation |
An EdgeSense sensor reading outside its safe band. | Delivered |
Sustained downtimeDowntimeDuration |
Unplanned downtime on an asset running past its target duration. | Delivered |
OEE / availability breachOEEBreach |
OEE or availability, computed from EdgeSense cycle and downtime data, dropping under target. | Delivered |
KPI breachKpiBreach |
Any tracked KPI (Key Performance Indicator) actual recorded against a target and missing it. | Delivered |
Schedule discrepancyScheduleDiscrepancy |
The shift schedule and the floor disagreeing for more than half an hour: scheduled but not running, running unscheduled, or the cycle-capture device offline. | Delivered |
Leader Standard WorkLSWMiss · LSWItemFail |
A routine whose grace window elapsed while it was still outstanding, or a checklist item that recorded a fail or a reading outside its tolerance band. | Delivered |
Inspection and work-order checkpointsInspectionFail · TaskResultFail |
A critical inspection item recording a Fail, or a required safety-critical step inside an executed work order doing the same. | Delivered |
Raised by a personManual |
A Gap someone raises directly from the board, for something no detector would catch. | Delivered |
Overdue preventive maintenancePMOverdue |
A PM (Preventive Maintenance) task from the maintenance schedule that is active, not suspended, has no work order pending against it, and is more than a day past due. Raising the work order retires the gap; if that work order then runs late, the gap comes back. | Delivered |
Twelve detectors, one record. A downtime Gap and a scrap Gap travel the identical loop, appear on the same board and drill the same way, so adding a new source later adds nothing for your team to learn. It also means the board is not limited to what one department watches: quality, maintenance, production and leadership all feed the same daily picture instead of each keeping their own.
Beyond detection, A-FMDS links to the records that carry the work, and reuses the infrastructure already in place.
| Existing ProAlert capability | Relationship to A-FMDS |
|---|---|
| Nonconformance register (NCR / ISO 9001) | Linked: an NCR can originate or specialise a Problem; the register stays the system of record for quality. |
| Work orders (CMMS) | Linked: a work order is an Action's execution sink; closing the WO can complete the Action. |
| Root-cause analysis & Kaizen | Linked: a Problem can open an RCA or a Kaizen idea; their countermeasures surface as Actions. |
| Andon downtime calls & safety incidents | Linked: a long downtime call or a safety incident can promote straight to a Problem. |
| SignalR real-time hub & daily metrics | Reused: A-FMDS rides the existing hub for live updates; no new infrastructure. |
A-FMDS produces clean, typed event streams but does not analyse them itself. A separate, pluggable intelligence layer (internally "RIX") will eventually consume those streams to rank recurring problems and suggest fixes. That layer is roadmap, not something you can switch on today. A-FMDS defines the seam; the analytics plug in without changing the spine.
A-FMDS is delivered in five phases, F1 through F5. Each phase is independently useful; the loop gets more complete as the phases land. All five phases are now delivered, so the closed loop runs end to end. What remains is described under What Is Still Coming.
| Phase | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| F1 | Event → Gap → Problem → live board update: the minimum viable loop. Targets, Gap detection, the Daily Board, and gap promotion. | Delivered |
| F2 | Full Problem lifecycle, the generic Action, the configurable escalation engine, and the Problems, Actions, and Escalations management screens. | Delivered |
| F3 | The full SQDCP Daily Board with TV display mode, drill-down, an Andon overlay, and accountability reporting and export. | Delivered |
| F4 | Coaching notes, Leader Standard Work (LSW) routines, and Tiered Meetings with auto-built agendas. | Delivered |
| F5 | Knowledge base, recurrence-driven learning, mobile push notifications, mobile pages, and security tightening. | Delivered |
| Hardening | Board honesty and lifecycle completion: a shift-aware activity window, non-completion closure for period-bound routines, schedule adherence on the spine, and business-resource scoping for asset-based gaps. | Delivered |
| Completion | The wall-board shape and the last detection sources: the SQDCP grid by day, metric tiles that open onto their own trend, a printable follow-up sheet for a single problem, per-shift Leader Standard Work, escalation for every target type the model defines, and overdue preventive maintenance raised from the maintenance schedule. | Delivered |
| Drill-down | The five-level path behind every metric tile: the trend at day to year, the breakdown by asset, product or shift, the driver Pareto, verification at three ranges side by side, internal PPM (parts per million) where a plant speaks it, and the whole path on the public board. | Delivered |
A-FMDS was designed as a spine from the start rather than retrofitted onto an existing product, which is why a gap raised by a sensor and a gap raised by a supervisor are genuinely the same record rather than two things made to look alike. That is also why each phase could be put in front of real users as it landed: the loop was complete at every step, just with fewer sources feeding it.
The board includes first-time-through, external PPM from customer-found defects, a green cross safety calendar, skills coverage and a Kaizen implementation tile. Internal scrap can show recorded weight and value when enabled. Trends draw governing targets; supported breakdowns can split by two dimensions and production trends can use Hour or Shift where source data supports them.
OEE at Level 4 shows Availability, Performance and Quality; safety ranks coded hazards. Level 5 names the controlled document in which a fix was standardised. Leader Standard Work routines and tiered meetings name their governing documents. See the A-FMDS User Guide for calculation, configuration and access details.
The loop is complete and every detection source is live, which makes it worth being precise about where the current build still draws a line. Each item below is a known boundary, not a discovered surprise, and each is described in the terms a floor team would notice it.
| Capability | What it means on the floor | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Targets scored per shift | A target is scored over a day, a week, a month, a quarter or a year. A plant that manages to a shift number, or wants a target judged live as the shift runs, cannot have that window scored yet. Both cadences appear in the target editor greyed out, so the intent stays visible without a target being quietly scored over a window nobody chose. | Planned |
| Safety narrowed to a line | OEE, scrap and downtime trends can be narrowed to a single Business Resource. The safety trend cannot, because the nightly roll-up it reads counts incidents for the plant, and the page says so rather than showing the plant figure under a filter's name. One level down the picture is better: an incident does record its asset and its location, so a safety point on the trend splits by asset and by location. What is still missing is the line filter above it. | Planned |
A daily management board earns trust by being accurate about the plant, and it keeps that trust by being accurate about itself. Everything above is a real boundary of the current build; nothing on the delivered list is aspirational. Where a screen offers a choice the engine cannot yet honour, that choice is shown disabled and labelled rather than hidden, so you can see what is coming without being able to configure something that would silently do nothing. If a screen does not match how your floor actually runs its day, that feedback shapes what gets built next.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A-FMDS | Automated Floor Management Development System: ProAlert's closed-loop daily management spine, described in this document. |
| FMDS | Floor Management Development System: the lean-manufacturing discipline A-FMDS automates. |
| Target | The defined "good" value for a metric at a scope. |
| Gap | A recorded instance of an actual value missing its target. |
| Problem | An owned operational issue, numbered
PRB-YYYYMMDD-NNNN. |
| Action | An executable step against a problem,
numbered ACT-YYYYMMDD-NNNN. |
| Promote | Converting a Gap into a Problem so it gets an owner. |
| SQDCP | Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost, People: the daily-management category framework. |
| Escalation | The timed, automatic raising of a stalled problem up the chain of command. |
| Recurrence key | A stable fingerprint that lets A-FMDS recognise "the same kind of problem" happening again. |
| LSW | Leader Standard Work: a recurring checklist a leader is expected to perform (delivered in Phase F4). |
This document is the concept. To see how people actually use A-FMDS day to day (the Board, Problems, Actions, and Escalations screens), read the A-FMDS User Guide.