Manage Plants and Equipment

Manage Plants

The Manage Plants page is used to manage the physical buildings that contain the equipment. The Name and Address of the plant are required.

The Plant Identifier field can be used as an alternative way to refer to a plant. This field can be left blank, but must be unique if filled out.

When defining a plant the Time Zone must be specified which allows for proper data collection and reporting across time zones.

Disabling a Plant will cause the plant to no longer show in other areas of the application such as the Manage Equipment form.

Manage Equipment

The Manage Equipment form is used to add, modify, or remove equipment from the system.

When adding or modifying equipment all fields expect for the Equipment Description are required fields. The License Level assigned will determine the type of DataXchange commands that can be run for the equipment. The license level can be changed at any time by modifying the equipment and selecting the new license level. The license level will synchronize with the DataXchange service within 3 minutes of making a licensing change.

Equipment must be associated to a plant when defining the equipment. Note that only plants with an Active status are shown in the list.

The DataXchange Service selection needs to be the computer that has the DataXchange Service installed that will be responsible for collecting data from the associated piece of equipment. The DataXchange Services can be defined on the Manage → DX Service form. If a machine is disabled, it does not need to be assigned to a DX Service and can be set to None. However to enable the machine a DX Service will need to be assigned.

Using the Status field to disable the Equipment will prevent any data from being collected and will hide the equipment from all reporting and charting functionality.

The Quantity of Licenses shows the amount of each license level that has been purchased and how many have already been assigned to equipment.

After machines have been created you can use the filter and sort options at the top of the page as an easy way to narrow down to specific machines. Click on the description header for that column to sort alphanumerically. By using the empty fields above the header, you are able to filter down your results even further by alphanumeric characters as well.

Manage Equipment Groups

The Manage Equipment Groups section is designed to allow the equipment to be structured in a hierarchy matching the structure of the facility. An unlimited amount of groups can be created and groups can be created within other groups. As an example, groups can be created to represent departments and then sub groups can be created for work centers.

To add a new group to the system, highlight the plant that you would like to add the group to and click the Add button. Assign it a name and click Enter. You can move the location of the newly created group during it’s creation or at a later time by clicking the Modify button and using the arrow buttons on the right to relocate the group within the hierarchy. Please note that all groups built under a plant must have a unique name.

Note: for reporting purposes separate reporting groups can be created allowing equipment to be a member of multiple groups.