Andon Line-Stop Alert Board: Raise a Call, Escalate It, Close It

The problem this kills

The andon light flashes red over Line 3. Maybe a team leader sees it. Maybe they're at the other end of the plant. Maybe the operator already walked off to find someone. Minutes tick by while a machine sits down, material runs short, or a quality problem keeps making bad parts — and nobody can say later how long it actually took anyone to respond, because nothing was written down.

A flashing light tells you something is wrong. It doesn't tell you what, it doesn't tell you who should come, it doesn't escalate when no one shows up, and it doesn't leave a record. That's how a two-minute fix turns into a twenty-minute hole in your shift, and how the same chronic problem keeps happening because it never gets counted. You don't need a forklift-priced MES module to fix this. You can build a digital andon board yourself.

What you'll build

A live internal web board for your floor. An operator taps a station and a call type — machine down, material short, quality issue, whatever your plant actually calls them — and the call appears on the board instantly, with a running clock. If the right responder doesn't acknowledge it within your set time, the tool escalates it by email up your matrix: team leader first, then maintenance or the supervisor. The responder acknowledges (the clock for "are we even on it?" stops), works the problem, then closes the call with a short resolution note. Every call records its time-to-acknowledge and time-to-resolve, and the whole day exports as a clean call log a supervisor can review.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your plant — your real stations and lines, the call types your operators actually raise, who responds to each type and how fast, the escalation timers in minutes, your shift pattern, and the messy edge cases like a call raised on the wrong station or a problem that needs two trades. It reads a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then builds the board around your floor instead of a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the operator call screen, the live board, the escalation timer and emails, the acknowledge-and-resolve flow, and the call-log export with response and resolution times. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a real operation needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so a plant or site only ever sees its own calls, and a complete audit trail of every call, acknowledgement, escalation, and close — who, what, and when. The human action is the gate here: a call isn't resolved because a timer ran out or a status flipped, it's resolved because a named responder acknowledged it and typed what they did, and a supervisor reviews the daily log. And a duplicate guard keyed on station + call timestamp keeps a double-tap from spawning two calls for the same event.

Who it's for

Operators, team leaders, maintenance techs, and production supervisors who are tired of relying on a light and a prayer. If you can describe who should come running when a given station calls — and how many minutes you'll wait before pulling in the next person — you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be raising and escalating your first real call this afternoon.