Beacon Production Workflow

From the customer's schedule file to verified labor hours — who does what, in what order, and the rules that keep the numbers honest. One page for the whole team.

The process at a glance

1Import the schedule

Drop the weekly production file into Build Schedule → Import Schedule. Beacon finds the headers wherever they sit in the file, applies the saved column mapping, and skips any PO already live in the system — re-importing never duplicates work.

The moment orders land, Beacon computes each one's engineered hours — the total labor the build requires at our standards — visible right in the schedule table. If an order's material isn't in Beacon or has no recipe, it's flagged immediately with a link to fix it. Nothing untimeable hides.

2Plan the week

In the Labor Planner, either drag orders from the tray onto lines by hand — watching cases-that-fit update live before committing — or press Suggest Schedule and let Beacon draft the whole week. The suggestion setup asks:

• Which days we're working — unchecked days are never used.
• Peak headcount for the shift — a hard ceiling; the plan never stacks more people at once than we have.
• Line preferences per PO — preferred lines first, backup lines only when preferred are busy, other lines never.
• Compact or Spread — finish as early as possible, or level the work across the days.

The draft appears unsaved: review it, drag anything, undo it entirely, then Save. The saved plan becomes each line's run queue and the hourly targets on every SAAG board.

3Run the line

The lead signs into Beacon on the line tablet, opens Checkpoint, and takes their line from the connect screen (one line per tablet — taking over another lead's session is a clean two-tap handoff; counts are never lost). The console is deliberately simple:

• Tap the big button every time a pallet is finished. That's the whole data entry. Undo for mistakes; partial-pallet entry at order end.
• Downtime (with a reason), Break, Notes, and Next Order when the run queue moves on — changeovers log their own downtime automatically.

The line's TV shows the SAAG board live: this hour's attainment, ahead/behind plan in cases, UPH against the SKU standard, the hourly record, and the takt conveyor — a case or display glides across every time one should have been built at standard rate, ghosted when the line is behind. Targets come from the group's standard crew rate; nobody types an expected number.

4Close out the line

At the end of the line's work, the lead hits Close Out on the tablet. Beacon shows the session summary — cases, pallets, downtime, and the active time, measured from the session itself, not remembered or typed. The lead is asked for the line's headcount by role — the same roles the Hour Tracker uses, with the total shown live as they enter it.

Line hours per role = the lead's role count × the measured active time. Submit sends the line's record to the coordinator's queue. The lead is done.

5Shift review & reconciliation

The coordinator's review screen shows every line's closed-out record: cases built, hours, downtime, notes. Here the coordinator enters the total headcount for the entire shift, by role — exactly as the Hour Tracker works today.

6Submit to the Hour Tracker

With every line closed and the numbers verified — cases built, hours, headcount by role — the coordinator submits. Beacon writes the day's record exactly as the Hour Tracker does today: same data, same destination, but built from measured line sessions instead of end-of-day memory. Every PO carries its own hours, cases, and crew — a day with three orders on one line splits its labor across all three, never piling onto the first.

7What flows automatically

• History — the day's hours and per-role attribution, immediately queryable.
• Daily / Monthly Synopsis — rollups including the day, no extra entry.
• KPI dashboards — cases per labor hour and trends update from the submitted record.
• Plan vs actual — the day's planner schedule against what the lines actually built: past days grade their plan blocks as built, short, or never ran, and unbuilt cases return to the planner for re-scheduling.

The three rules that protect the numbers

• Measured beats remembered. Hours come from session clocks; production comes from pallet taps at the moment they happen. The only typed numbers are the headcounts by role — per line from the lead, per shift from the coordinator.
• Nothing submits over an open line. The coordinator's gate guarantees every line's story is finished before the day becomes official.
• One person counts once. The floater rule reconciles line-level counts against the shift truth, role by role, so moving people where the work is never inflates labor.