Digitalising a production line counter with Mailway

Mailway is the UK’s leading independent contract packer. The business works across a variety of sectors, delivering concept-to-consumer co packing solutions to international and aspirational brands. 

The production line counter 

Mailway had created an innovative production line counter on Raspberry Pi. The ‘proof of concept’ solution was working to monitor production efficiency on a single line. They approached Fluid for assistance in digitalising the data capture with a workflow and scaling the solution across production lines.  

Digitalising processes to leverage value from data  

The Raspberry Pi counter effectively monitored the production line and captured data. However the data was then manually extracted and imported into a spreadsheet for analysis. The delay limited the value as the analysis and insight were always out of date. Mailway looked for help in automating processes and scaling the solution across multiple production lines and users.  

A scalable solution with BI reports on data dashboards

Fluid expanded the solution by building a workflow and BI solution to populate data dashboards for real time analysis, by multiple users across multiple lines, sites and shifts.

The updated version on Raspberry Pi regularly sends the data via WiFi to a database hosted in Amazon Web Services. Fluid built a Power BI dashboard over the data so Mailway receives the information in real time, and can use visual reports that are easier to consume.

Fluid sent the solution with guidance on installation and implementation. Mailway gained the ability to scale their original proof of concept over multiple production lines. The fully digitalised solution provides insight to identify areas for improvements in productivity.