A coating shop's day you can play

The question behind every big purchase

A coating shop owner whose day keeps running late has a choice to make. The booth is backed up, so maybe a second booth. Or the oven runs half empty, so maybe it is the oven. Or the problem is that the same color goes in on Monday and again on Thursday. Each answer is a big cheque, and the only way to find out today is to buy the thing and see.

We wanted owners to try the answer first. And we wanted it to feel like something you would play on a Sunday, not a spreadsheet.

The floor as a game board

My Facility draws the shop as a small isometric world: the counter, the blast cabinets, wash and pretreatment, the booths, the oven, the cooling racks, quality control and the packing bench, with people at their stations and racks of wheels and frames moving between them. Every machine carries its real numbers, the way Rainbow Flex keeps them: what fits inside, minutes per rack, set-up and color-change time, oven temperature and how long parts take to reach it, electricity and gas, the people it needs and its hours. Around them sit the compressors, dust collectors and tool walls a real shop has.

Then you press play. The day runs from seven to five. Orders arrive at the counter and from the online customizer, racks go through their recipe step by step, and each station shows its Flex task board at that minute: what is waiting, what is being worked, what is done.

Finding where the day goes

The demo shop runs 27 jobs in a day. When it plays out, a queue builds at the second powder booth and at the oven, three of the jobs due that day miss five o’clock, and the booths lose almost seven hours to color changes. The oven runs part-empty, because low-bake wet-paint racks cannot share a load with powder racks at 400 °F.

Open any job and its route lights up on the floor, with every wait grouped by reason: waiting for the booth while it sprayed other colors, waiting for a free person, cooling. Next to it sits what the job cost in labor, electricity and gas.

Trying the answer before buying it

The compare view runs the same day on two layouts side by side. Add a second oven and two more jobs go out on time, but the gas bill goes up and the loads run thin. Group colors in the booths instead and two more jobs make it as well, with no new machine and about the same energy. Where the oven stands changes the answer too, which is the reason the what-if exists.

One engine, three products

My Facility began inside Rainbow Flex, as the floor view for coating shops. The simulation under it now also runs LineFit, where installers plan whole finishing lines, and Eclipse, where recyclers plan their plants. The demo below is the real thing running in your browser, on the demo shop.