Plan a finishing line inside the customer's own building

A line sold off a sketch

Selling a powder coating line goes the same way most times. The installer visits, takes photos, measures what he can, and draws the line on a plan back at the office. The customer signs off a drawing with boxes on it. Then the steel arrives and the hall disagrees: a rafter sits where the conveyor climbs, a column is inside the swing of the hanging parts, a bend is tighter than the chain allows, or the oven is too short for the parts to cure at the line speed everyone agreed on.

We built LineFit so those arguments happen on a screen, in the first week, while changing the plan costs nothing.

The building first, in meters

A LineFit project starts from what is there: a phone video of the hall, a floor plan, a PDF or a CAD export. One known length sets the scale, and from then on everything is in meters. Walls go up to the eaves, columns and roller doors stand where they stand, the mezzanine goes over the office, and the forklift lane is marked on the floor. Then the services: clear height under the frames, compressed air, gas at the meter, the power tray, a way out through the roof for the exhaust. Each one is a number the line is checked against later.

Machines go in at their data-sheet sizes with their working space and service sides. The pretreatment tunnel, the booth with its cyclone, the curing oven.

Twelve kinds of rail, checked while you draw

Then the conveyor. LineFit knows twelve systems, from a manual push monorail to power and free, inverted and edge conveyors, cart tracks, cranes and dip lines. Pick one, click the corners, place the drive and the load and unload stations. Every change runs the checks, and the findings read like an engineer wrote them:

Only 7.8 m of Line 1 is in Oven 1: at 1.5 m/min that is 5.2 min, the cure needs 20 min.

Line 1 at 5.80 m runs into the rafter of frame 6: the underside is at 5.90 m and the rail needs 0.10 m below it.

Power and free bends need a 1.20 m radius, so a corner drawn at 1.00 m becomes a finding the moment the line changes type. A 1.2 m load bar swings 0.75 m either side of the rail, and a column inside that envelope is a finding too. The project lead can accept a finding with a reason, and the plan keeps who accepted it.

A day on the line, and a second option

A drawing that fits can still be too slow. So LineFit runs a whole working day through the line. On the tutorial hall, option A (a 12 m oven at 0.6 m/min) finishes 22 jobs, 14 of them on time. Option B (a 14 m oven at 0.7 m/min, still 20 minutes in the oven) finishes 24, with 16 on time. The two sit side by side on one card, and the customer sees what the longer oven buys.

We also ran a study of model shops through the same engine, to answer the questions owners ask most. In a 700 m² shop, a second booth took the shop from 13 orders a day to 19, while a second oven added nothing and cost about 22 % more energy per order. In a small shop with four people, a fifth person did more than a second booth.

What the customer takes home

From the same project LineFit prints the plan at true scale with dimensions and a title block, a proposal with the options compared on one working day, and a film of the new line running in the customer’s own hall. The customer also gets a private link to walk around the line on a phone, with no account.

LineFit runs today as an internal preview, on example halls and model shops. Walk through a whole LineFit project, from the empty plot to the proposal.