How BEDMATE™ Works

Daily Operations

With BEDMATE's parameters established for your specific plant, all that remain are the daily processing tasks that will maximize your tempering operations.  Every effort has been taken to minimize the amount of human intervention necessary, without sacrificing the overall flexibility available to a facility.

Office

Simply selecting Rack Optimization (RO), one of the normal steps for processing a glass schedule through WINDOWMATION™, awakens BEDMATE's powerful Cutlist creation, optimization and rack/slot assignment modules.  There is nothing more for the Glass Scheduler to do. 

BEDMATE™ automatically intercepts the normal Rack Optimization process to extract tempering requirements and places them within a BEDMATE™ subdirectory.  BEDMATE™ then creates Cutlists for the unique glass thickness, color and film requirements based upon your company’s parameter settings. 

As the high yielding load bed optimization techniques complete, the rack assignments for glass moving from cutting to tempering are updated.  This results in the ability for lites at Tempering to be pulled from racks in sequence, thereby minimizing load time and providing easy access to each sequential slot.

Once BEDMATE™ completes its processing of a glass schedule, it automatically returns control to the Rack Optimization modules that complete the normal scheduling and glass optimization processes.

When glass schedules are removed via WINDOWMATION’s Remove Schedules (RS) module, all associated schedules within BEDMATE™ are automatically deleted.

Plant

At the end of each cutting line the breakout display shows the appropriate rack/slot into which each lite is to be placed so that when the rack moves to Tempering it can be most efficiently unloaded into the furnace.

The load end of the tempering line has a large television Load Display.  The operator indicates the schedule to be processed and BEDMATE™ automatically determines the first rack and slot containing glass to be tempered.  Should the line wish to begin with a different thickness/color, a quick look at the Rack Report provides insight into the slot number that should be specified to override the default displayed.

For each cycle of the furnace, the Load Display (television) shows the Rack and Slot numbers, along with their relative position on the bed, for each lite that comprises a load.

The Off-Load end of the tempering line has a similar television display.  It, however, shows the rack and slot numbers into which the tempered lites are to be placed. 

Special Reports

Similar to OPTIMATE's Glass Usage Summary Report, BEDMATE™ maintains a history of its optimization performance.  This report can be printed at any time, from any properly configured MATE workstation.  Reports help to quantify BEDMATE’s overall success at maximizing load beds, based upon a plant’s particular parameter settings.

BEDMATE™ is parameter driven to allow each plant to best configure the system for its unique needs.  Normally established during the software installation and training process, these values remain untouched unless there is a change in a plant’s mode of operations.  In particular, BEDMATE™ users have control over:

Bed Sizes

The effective sizes of the load bed are controlled similar to OPTIMATE's glass inventory maintenance.  Dimensions can be specified for specific glass thicknesses and colors.  A user-defined default thickness and color combination can be used to minimize maintenance tasks when bed sizes don’t change. 

Spacing Between Pieces

The space to be left between lites of glass can be specified based upon the thickness and color of the lites being loaded.  Adequate spacing insures that lites don’t accidentally collide as they are conveyed over the rollers.

Roll Distortion

Consideration for roll distortion can be based upon a lite's ultimate location within a unit (outboard (a), middle (c/e), inboard (c/e)).  If distortion considerations are applied, lites are oriented so that their base dimension (as specified via the bridge from your business system) enters the furnace first (perpendicular to the in-feed rollers). 

Diagonal Orientation

There may be situations were a small lite might fall between rollers as it makes its way down the tempering line.  Based upon the "distance between rolls" parameter, BEDMATE™ automatically aligns lites diagonally for feeding down the line.

Thickness and Color Groupings

Unlike glass that needs to be separated based upon both its thickness and color, many tempering facilities are only concerned with the thickness of glass and whether or not it is coated since only these two factors impact the setup of their furnace.  Parameters allow users to indicate the grouping techniques to be considered when BEDMATE™ Cutlists are created.

Temper As

A table based configurator makes it possible to specify glass types that need to be tempered differently from their actual thickness.  For example, it may be necessary to temper patterned glass at the next higher thickness settings to achieve the best overall quality.