WINDOWMATE™

Glass Optimizer for Window Manufacturers

WINDOWMATE™ is a production control software system designed to enhance your manual or automated glass cutting operation.  WINDOWMATE™ insures the best utilization of your glass inventory and allows your glass cutting and insulating departments to produce quality products in a fraction of the time.

WINDOWMATE™'s computerized glass optimization produces optimal cutting layouts with less material waste.  It generates Numerical Control (NC) instructions that interface with all leading glass cutting tables.  With WINDOWMATE™, you’ll recognize not only savings in glass inventory costs but also savings in valuable floor space gained by reducing your glass inventory to just a few sizes.

Through your business system, you have control and flexibility in selecting and scheduling your window or door orders, creating schedules tailored to your plant’s unique production requirements.  This allows you to consider customer needs, shipping requirements, and so forth when scheduling production.  WINDOWMATE™ retains this scheduling information.

A variety of formats exist to allow you to transfer glass-cutting requirements from your existing computerized order entry system to WINDOWMATE™. This "bridging" process eliminates the possibility of typing errors or omissions that can occur when information is manually entered. 

Once schedules are received from the business system, WINDOWMATE™'s Schedule Maintenance allows you to make changes to the order detail or add or delete order-items as necessary before the schedule is processed.

WINDOWMATE™ is designed to automatically separate the glass of an IG unit by color and thickness for optimization and then return the cut lites to schedule sequence.  A large television monitor guides breakout personnel as to where each lite of glass is to be placed. Cut lites are loaded onto harp racks in original schedule sequence for further processing.  Your glass cutting operation will run smoother, faster, and more efficiently due to WINDOWMATE™'s level of automation.

Should a lite of glass get broken or misplaced, the operator may either reenter the lite into WINDOWMATE™ and optimize it with the next schedule, or have the cutting table operator cut it using TABLEMATE™, (our manual layout cutting software).  In addition, WINDOWMATE™ integrates with PMC Software’s Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) System to tie your front office and plant together by informing the front office of the problem.  In all cases, the harp rack assignment number assures that the lite will meet its mate prior to insulating.  

WINDOWMATE™'s wide range of reports provides various levels of insight into such things as inventory levels, optimization results, cutting instructions, and harp rack assignment numbers. Reports and easy-to-read cutting layouts are available both in printed and on-screen formats. 

In particular, the Hand Cutting Report provides a way of checking to insure that all glass is accounted for.  It lists lites that are to be hand cut due to low yield cutting layouts, specialty shapes, or other reasons necessitating hand cutting.