For many years I have been trying to find a good solution to go paperless on the production floor. For each part number we produce I have a single drawing with multiple sheets. Each sheet shows the results of a step in the machining process for inspection and verification purposes. At the moment we rely on paper copies clipped to each machining station for the operators to reference. This results in a LOT of paper and toner being used throughout the year and has been the source of several major quality issues due to out of date or unapproved drawings making their way to the floor. My goal is to put a monitor at every station tied to a centralized computer with a "shop" level login that can only access approved drawings. The problem is getting the proper sheet display on the proper monitor. This seems like it would be a relatively common application but up till now I have had little success in finding a good solution other than a few pieces of multi-monitor management softwares which don't deal with the hardware issue of attaching upwards of 20 monitors to a single machine. I don't want to go to a computer at every station due to hardware and SW licensing costs. Any suggestions?
I toured a place recently that had all their work instructions on tablets secured to each station. The tablets were inexpensive and had login access controls and connected to the shop wi-fi. This place used work instructions created in Word with drawing attachments and then all saved as pdf's for static control (the operators could do nothing to change the pdf's.) The pdf's were revision controlled. The operators could zoom into anything as needed. Some of these work instructions had check boxes for the operator to indicate they had performed an item. These carried with them a time stamp. It was a very nice solution that worked for them.