Hey friends,
Another use case which I have always struggled to solve. I know there have been other threads about this and I wonder if the product team is working on features here.
Frequently this comes up when building applications for discrete assembly in regulated industries. Work instructions are broken into a series of apps. An operator might be halfway done with App 2 in their process, but they cannot continue for certain reasons. Or they need to switch to an alternative app for some side responsibility. There is no great way to stop an app execution in the middle.
For this reason, I have always advised clients to build applications which are meant to be completed in one go. This has some perks, actually, because it makes production visibility very clear. But complex assemblies generally do not work like this. Operators are very fluid and will often bounce between many production steps and units.
Does anyone have advice here? I know that you can set up apps to log the “latest step” and do some logic to bring the operator back when they re-open the app, but this gets really out of hand as soon as you start having variables which are required for tracking progress or data collection. It doesn’t scale.
or are there any product updates being worked on to simplify this? My head goes to some feature which would allow you to save all variables as a JSON when you exit an app (somewhere), then be able to pick up that execution later on. Or even a way to switch to a secondary station easily while one station is frozen on the previous app?