How to Automate CyFrame

Every part that leaves the plant started as pellets somebody bought

CyFrame is an ERP built for one industry: plastics processing. Blow moulders, injection moulders, profile extruders, film and sheeting lines, and the colour and compounding houses that supply them all run on it.

A plastics plant needs its own ERP rather than a general one because its unit of account is odd. A general ERP thinks in pieces. A processor thinks in pounds of resin, and then in what became of those pounds: how much went out as saleable footage, how much came back as regrind, how much left as scrap. Machine hours and die changeovers are the other constraint, and neither is cheap.

CyFrame holds all of that. The customer order and the price list behind it, the recipe, the work order on a line, the material issued against it, what the operator recorded at the machine, and the margin that came out at the end.

The pellets get repriced between the quote and the run

Resin is a commodity, and its price moves without asking. A contract signed on last quarter's number can be under water by the time the order runs, so somebody watches the market, reads the supplier's monthly letter and works out whether the price list changes this month or next.

That is one of several standing errands. A railcar of resin is somewhere between the producer and your siding and nobody can say where. The masterbatch house quotes a lead time that moves each time you ask. A packaging or automotive customer publishes next month's releases on a supplier portal, in their format, and somebody retypes them into the order book. A die maker owes you a date on the tooling the new profile depends on.

None of it is running an extruder. All of it decides what the extruder runs.

CyFrame

Resin prices set beside your own list Posted movements and supplier quotes collected the same day each month, so a contract that has gone under water shows up before the next run rather than after the quarter.

Inbound material with a real position Railcars and truckloads tracked on the carrier's own site, so a line three days from running out of natural resin knows about it three days early.

Customer releases without the retyping Next month's schedule pulled off the OEM's supplier portal in their format and delivered in yours, ready to check against the production calendar.

The production calendar plans around resin the plant already owns

CyFrame takes the inside of the plant off the table, and a processor should have all of it switched on before looking anywhere else.

A dynamic drag-and-drop production calendar schedules work orders around machine and mould or die conflicts, so a changeover is planned rather than discovered. Material Requirements Planning verifies availability live across virgin resins, colours, additives and regrind, and Capacity Requirements Planning and Labor Requirements Planning reports show where the hours actually are. Shop floor data acquisition is standard rather than an upsell: operators record quantities, production and setup time, rejects, downtime and lot control from a touchscreen with barcode labels, and an optional PLC module reads the machines directly. Profitability reporting, quality management, warehouse management and a B2B customer portal sit on the same data.

Every one of those describes material the plant has bought and machines the plant owns.

The number that decides whether a job was worth running is a resin price published somewhere else, and the date it can start is a shipment sitting on a railroad.

A hopper car can be tracked to the siding

A plant can plan on numbers it does not own, and a buyer's own logins are all it takes. The supply chain publishes its news. It just publishes it somewhere else.

Resin prices and posted supplier movements collected on the same day each month and set beside your own price list, so a contract that has gone under water is visible before the next run. Railcar and truckload positions tracked on the carrier's own site, so the line three days from running out of natural resin knows it three days early.

Masterbatch, additive and packaging lead times read off each supplier's account page against the schedule that needs them. Customer release schedules pulled from the OEM's supplier portal in their format and put into yours, so next month's demand does not arrive by retyping. Tooling chased at the mould shop, since a late cavity moves a launch date with it. Regrind and scrap prices watched too, because the by-product is revenue.

The pellet market keeps moving after everyone goes home

The market does not wait for office hours, and neither does a railcar. Somebody has to look, an hour a day, at pages that never finish updating, and that hour is the first thing dropped in a week when a line goes down.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the resin supplier's account, the railroad's tracking page or the customer's supplier portal, reads what is posted and hands it back against the work orders, items and price lists it belongs to.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything going out to a customer or a supplier is drafted for a person to send.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.