"What about display boards?"

"You know, like large LED signs!"

So don't worry, if you're into nice big chocolaty display stands they're not going to escape my focus of attention for long.

There is lots of often overlooked scope for using displays, display stands, LED sign for general information display, production figures and/or morale boosting.

Display boards, like this sort of big LED sign for production figures, are often just looked upon as a frilly optional edition to machine information systems.

"After all, it's only going display all the same information data you have on the host displaying computer, so what's the point!"
This was a statement retorted to me some time ago!

Which I have to say, I disagree with that outlook completely. I have built systems where a large production LED sign hanging from the ceiling or on the overlooking machine shop wall was the first thing the clients concerned were looking for.

C'mon guys, we all love lights and buttons to play with on display boards don't we.

I have, to date, built two machine information systems with a large LED sign attached to them and when I say large I mean eight feet wide and six feet high. Also they had to be viewable in broad daylight, that was a task an' a half I can tell you!

Incidentally, I have also built numerous other varying sizes of electronic display system but these particular two were an integral part of a machine information system.

In fact one of the systems had the LED sign as the only viewing point for all the machine information data, I thought they were mad at the time. The customer is always right, as it was proved to me. Both viewed a LED sign as more important than to have a screen on the manager’s desk in an office.

This was the starting point for both their machine shop projects and a very necessary part of a machine information system for them.

They both had the same two reasons for their way of thinking, the first was to impress potential customers with the sites capacity for production. A LED sign with continually updating production figures was wanted as a sales point.

The second was to get some healthy competition going between the shift work teams with a weekly prize for the best shift, I thought that made sense. Now this was not just on the highest production but also on waste and machine set-up times, all of these figures were on the display for each shift.

I though this was a very good way of encouraging higher production, totally at the other end of the scale from the browbeating method that a lot of places seem to use. Also very successful as well, I have been told on many occasions.

As far as machine shop projects go there is a lot more scope than first meets the eye with a machine information system, all you have to do is nail it down. A happy workforce is an efficient one as they say, I do agree don't you.

What do you think?

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