AL MES

Overview

AL MES puts a tablet on the shop floor: operators capture Start, Pause and Finish on each routing operation as it happens - no paper traveler to fill in, no end-of-day re-keying. Each action is turned into standard Business Central output and capacity postings, with machine time and operator time kept apart and labor split proportionally when one person runs several operations at once.

Key features

• Touch operator client - operators run Start, Pause and Finish on routing operations straight from a tablet; operators, machine and work centers, and scrap reasons are all exposed over a REST/OData Web API.
• Start / Pause / Finish capture - each action is a timed routing entry with produced and scrapped quantities; an operation can span several segments and the engine reconstructs the real active time from the start/end stamps.
• Two-axis capacity - separate machine and operator capacity lines, so equipment load and labor are measured and costed independently.
• Proportional co-work allocation - when an operator tends several operations in overlapping windows, their time is split proportionally to the parts produced, deferred until the whole group is finished so it is never partial - and this holds even across different machines run by the same operator.
• Header orders with a shared phase - output and scrap are apportioned across the linked lines by largest-remainder (Hamilton) rounding.
• Standard posting - output posts through the standard Capacity Ledger, with no parallel data model or custom posting engine to maintain.
• Time verification - a supervisor can mark a released order's captured times as verified; an optional setup gate then calculates output, consumption and operator capacity only from verified orders (unverified entries are skipped), while journal posting stays standard Business Central.

Business benefits

• Real-time feedback - progress reaches the ERP as it happens, not at end of day by re-keying paper tickets.
• True labor costing - operator time is allocated per operation and per part, even across parallel machines.
• Audit-ready - everything lands in the standard output and capacity engine, ready for standard reporting.
• Trustworthy times - captured times can be reviewed and signed off before they become output and capacity entries, not after.

Typical scenarios

• Precision machining and tooling - one operator loads and runs several CNC operations in parallel.
• Cutting and sawing - several orders opened and closed together with consistent output.
• Coating and treatment lines - supervised batch work whose time is shared across the jobs that ran together.

What makes it different

The shop floor gets a fast touch client - Start, Pause, Finish, done - yet Business Central still receives the hard part: deterministic per-part labor costing across co-worked operations, on two separate capacity axes, through the standard Capacity Ledger. It extends standard BC manufacturing and integrates over AL Message Passing (for example with AL Processing Charge).