Shopfloor Copilot's Visual Line Designer lets industrial engineers model production lines graphically. Drag and drop workstations onto a BPMN canvas, configure ideal cycle times, assign OPC UA nodes to each station, and instantly connect the model to live OEE data — no programming required.
Production line balancing assigns work tasks and cycle times to workstations so that each station's workload is equal to the takt time (the rate at which products must be completed to meet customer demand). A perfectly balanced line has no station sitting idle while another is overloaded.
In practice, imbalanced lines create bottleneck stations — single points that constrain total throughput. Identifying and resolving bottlenecks is one of the highest-ROI activities in lean manufacturing. Shopfloor Copilot's Line Designer makes it possible to model, measure, and improve line balance without spreadsheets.
Built on bpmn-js. Add workstations from a palette of 11 station types: Assembly, Inspection, Welding, Painting, Machining, Testing, and more. Arrange flow visually.
Per-station properties: name, type, ideal cycle time (seconds), critical flag, OPC UA node assignment. All changes persist in the plant model.
Once stations are defined and mapped to OPC UA nodes, OEE data immediately begins flowing. No additional configuration steps.
Model up to hundreds of lines and stations across a plant. Switch between lines without losing changes. Full plant hierarchy preserved.
Line models are stored as standard BPMN XML. Import existing process models from your MES or PLM system. Export for documentation.
Assembly, Machining, Inspection, Welding, Painting, Testing, Packaging, Logistics, Storage, Robotic, General. Each type has pre-configured OPC UA signal expectations.
Production line balancing assigns work tasks to workstations so each station's workload equals the takt time. A well-balanced line minimises idle time and maximises throughput. Imbalanced lines create bottlenecks — one station at capacity while others wait.
BPMN in manufacturing visually represents production process flows — operation sequences, parallel workstreams, and material flows. In Shopfloor Copilot's Line Designer, BPMN task nodes represent workstations with properties for station type, ideal cycle time, and OPC UA node assignment.
Explore the prototype's the BPMN line canvas, station configuration panel, and automatic OEE connection — using a pre-built model of a 4-line, 24-station assembly plant.
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