I've showed my progress to the engineer of the line...he's really impressed. Line of the year for me was

"The guys in CI (continuous Improvement) have been trying to get something like this going for years "

My reply "That's why it's called continous improvement...they never finish anything"

We're moving forward (almost at full steam) with my project. I've been given various ideas such as a counter for reject reason, and a graph charting where they are coming from, and production by shift by hour. Both these things can easily be done (well, if the database had been written right, the error counters would be simple, but as always with databases at work, they make ZERO sense). God, was I the only person in this world with Norm Olsen as a teacher???

So I showed off my little report to the controller yesterday. The one with the live data collection. He almost blew his load, he really liked what he saw (and accountants normally don't show emotion). Kinda good to know that I'll have some nice software up and running by the time I go on vacation next week. And then I'll pull a Costanza and leave on a high note! Ahhh yes, my master plan is slowly coming together, just in time for performance reviews!!

Ok for those wonder what I did to get the live updates for datacollection, here it is in a nutshell.

The query to group my results by hour of the day (it still needs work done, i'm going to turn it into a subquery one of these days.

SELECT
DATEPART("hh",PD_000_00),
COUNT(PD_200_02) AS TotalParts,
SUM(PD_010_05 * 0) AS Good
FROM
RAS3524_ProcessData
WHERE
PD_000_00 >= (SELECT CONVERT(char(10), GETDATE(), 112))
AND (PD_200_02 <> 'PASS')
GROUP BY
DATEPART("hh",PD_000_00)
UNION
SELECT
DATEPART("hh",PD_000_00),
COUNT(PD_200_02) AS TotalParts,
SUM(PD_010_05) AS Good
FROM
RAS3524_ProcessData
WHERE
PD_000_00 >= (SELECT CONVERT(char(10), GETDATE(), 112))
AND (PD_200_02 = 'PASS')
GROUP BY
DATEPART("hh",PD_000_00)
ORDER BY
DATEPART("hh",PD_000_00)

That gives me my parts made. First part of the union is for rejected parts, second part is good parts. In reporting services, I do a conditional sum based on the good column (if good > 0 add total parts). Now with that done, I created a subscription in reporting services to create a web archive based on the the above report (it's got a graph too).

Now, we have a few plasma screens in the production offices displaying current counts. In powerpoint, I inserted a webpage and had it dynamically update (the feature is built into 2003, I'm not sure about powerpoint 2000) so every time the slide is shown, we get updated reject information (10 minutes delayed, but still good enough)!

Next project of mine, is to do the same thing, but for shipping schedules with the datasource being TRANS4M instead of SQL Server.

I'm adding one more thing to my little project today. Using reporting services, I'm going to graph the daily production reports (15 minute intervals) and output that to our web server. I'm also going to try and get this to be dynamically updated in powerpoint (by linking to a file) so that everybody in the lunchroom can see how we're doing for the current day.

I've just signed up with adsense on my site. Lets see how much it'll bring in for me. If I get $5 I'll be a VERY happy guy!

I'm still working on my big idea at work. It's going to center around 3 big principles:

1) ASP Webpage with live production numbers for the current day.
2) A report in reporting services that will e-mail weekly production numbers to the management team
3) An hourly agent to notify the appropriate people when something starts going wrong on the line.

Amazing that a company with revenues in the the hundres of millions doesn't have this yet, I'll post up my work as I go (so in case I ever leave this place, I'll have a copy of what I've done).

Thanks for all those who submitted ideas to me (zero).

Rando idea for work:

pull production data out of database, plot and graph (using reporting services) problem areas of the lines and tell the six sigma fuckers how to fix it.

I think I may just be excited about going to work again, and if I ever actually pull off this idea, I see big things for my future. (yes, I was reading forbes today and was inspired.)

If anybody has an idea for something I can do at work (I'm talking a programming project on the side, related to manufacturing) please let me know.

Man those lions need to learn how to NOT beat themselves. That's all I'll say about them.

Went to Giancarlo's wedding on Saturday. Good times, saw some OLD pictures from when we were kids, plust a few pics from my first F1 race (circa 2002) and a few Bills-Dolphins football games (noteably the one in a 2002 snow storm).

Do a search on google for me As of today, my digg profile comes up before this website! WTF is going on here?!? And yes as you can see according to my digg profile, I have no friends! I guess that doesn't make me one of them. Which is good!

My blog is over 4 years old. Wow.

I'm counting down the last hour of my day here...praying I get out of here by 5...only 1 hour to go. I've found myself a nice deal on a convertible mustang for my San Diego Trip. 53.09 a day! Not too shabby! Gonna rent one for two days and drive up to LA and back. Should be fun...and unlimited miles!!!! Used coupon code U024100 at budget.com for those interested. Now I gotta book some hotels in San Francisco and Las Vegas (well, book a room at the luxor there, I'm not finding any special deals right now).

Heading back to Senneca tonight. I'm hoping that I can get a descent table like I had last week. Just gotta play my game and keep everybody else guessing and I'll do fine. Speaking of doing fine, I can't wait for Vegas. I'm really looking forward to it. I think this time more than the previous times, I want to gamble (which means, I'll lose more money than the previous trips).

Football season starts in 6 days (well, 9 for the rest of us non-Dolphin/Steeler fans). LETS GO LIONS...of course if you have been reading up, you'll know they'll tank the first 8 weeks, and be really bad.