Overview
Workstations are the designated locations within your laboratory where similar work activities and production tasks are performed. They serve as organizational units that group related tasks, manage technician assignments, and control workflow routing throughout your manufacturing process.
What are Workstations?
A workstation represents a physical or logical area in your facility where specific types of production work occur. A more traditional term for this concept is a "workbench". Each workstation can accommodate multiple technicians and is configured to handle particular categories of manufacturing tasks. Workstations provide structure to your production workflow by defining where work happens, who performs it, and how tasks are assigned.
Creating a Workstation
To create a new workstation in Pilot:
Navigate to Admin → Manufacturing → Workstations
Click the Add Workstation button
When creating a workstation, you must specify the following essential information:
Name: Provide a descriptive name that clearly identifies the workstation's function or location. Examples might include "Design Station," "Milling Center," "Finishing Booth," or "Quality Control."
Sequence: Specify the numerical order in which this workstation should be scheduled within your production workflow. This sequence number determines the chronological order of operations. Workstations that share the same sequence number will be scheduled to run in parallel, allowing for simultaneous processing of different aspects of production.
Type of Work Assignment: Select how work will be distributed to technicians at this workstation. There are four distinct assignment types available, each with specific characteristics for task management:
Automatic Assignment: Pilot takes full control of work distribution based on intelligent algorithms that consider technician availability and capacity settings. Technicians cannot self-assign tasks to themselves, but managers can still manually re-assign specific tasks to individual technicians. Pilot uses the "least busy technician" model for assignments.
Manual Assignment - Push Model: This assignment type gives managers complete control over task distribution. Managers can assign specific production tasks to individual technicians based on their judgment, expertise requirements, or workload considerations. However, technicians cannot self-assign tasks and must wait for management to distribute work to them.
Manual Assignment - Pull Model: In this configuration, technicians have the autonomy to self-assign available tasks from the workstation's queue. They can review pending work and choose which tasks to complete based on their availability and preferences. Managers cannot override this process by assigning tasks directly to specific technicians, as the system relies on technician initiative to pull work from the available queue.
Custom Assignment: This flexible option combines elements of both manual assignment types. Technicians retain the ability to self-assign available tasks from the workstation queue, while managers also have the authority to assign specific tasks to particular technicians when needed.
Next Workstations: Pilot allows parallel processing of tasks, so you need to connect the workstations to avoid ambiguity in task routing.
Department: Choose the department that this workstation belongs to within your organizational structure. This association is primarily used for reporting purposes and helps organize workstations into logical groupings for management and analysis.
Location: enter the physical location of the workstation within your laboratory facility. Whenever a technician completes a production task at this workstation, Pilot will automatically update the case's location to reflect where the work was performed, providing real-time tracking of case progress through your facility.
After successfully creating and configuring your workstations, you can begin assigning production template tasks to them.
The routing configuration (next workstations) you establish is essential for Pilot to accurately determine the prerequisites for each subsequent task in your production schedule. When cases move through your workflow, Pilot uses these routing relationships to understand which previous tasks must be completed before a technician can begin work on the next task in the sequence.