Pulse User Guide

Pulse opens on the Dashboard. Across the top is the main menu, and it stays with you everywhere:

1. Dashboards - a menu of the three live timeline views: Unified Timeline (the Dashboard, several devices at once), Employee Punch Timeline (who was clocked on, next to what the machine was doing), and Day at a Glance (one device's whole day, summarized).
2. Plan Realization - how actual production is tracking against plan.
3. Alerts - rules that watch your devices and notify the right people.
4. Reports - a menu of shift, production, and OEE reports.
5. Data Export - the raw rows behind everything else, filtered and downloaded as CSV, Excel, or PDF.
6. Utility - extra tools: the Comparison Tool, and Open line display for putting Pulse on a screen at the line itself.
7. Settings - shift emails, downtime rules, anomaly detection, and more.

On the far right, a sun/moon button switches Pulse between light and dark - use whichever suits your screen and lighting. Everything in Pulse renders cleanly both ways.

The Dashboard is the Unified Production Dashboard - a live timeline of what your machines are doing. Pick one or more devices on the left and Pulse draws their production as horizontal bands across the day.

The filter panel (left). Top to bottom:

• Devices - check the machines you want to see. Use the search box or All to move quickly. (Tip: Only Show Data From Running Devices hides anything idle so a busy plant stays readable.)
• Hierarchy - narrow to a plant, area, or line instead of picking devices by hand.
• Time Filter - the window the timeline covers. Pick Shift (this shift, last shift, and so on), Time Range (an explicit start and end), or Relative - Last 12 Hours, Last 24 Hours, or Last 7 Days. A relative window can also Keep range rolling, so it re-anchors itself as time passes instead of freezing where you left it.
• Channels - which bands to draw: Scheduled Job, Job, Shift Hour, Shift, and Process State.
• Timeline metric - how the bands are colored (Efficiency, OEE, and so on), so good and bad time jump out at a glance.

Reading the timeline. Each selected device gets a stack of bands:

• Job - the part/job running, with its live efficiency and good vs. target counts right on the bar.
• Hour and Shift - the hour and shift the time falls in.
• State - the fine-grained machine state (running, down, changeover, and so on), color-coded.

Green is good, amber and red flag lost time. Hover any segment and the details panel on the right fills in with the exact numbers for that slice. Where operators were clocked on during that slice, the details panel also lists them by role - Primary, Secondary, Maintenance, and Other.

Where the running job is heading. While a job is still running, Pulse draws its bar out to a Predicted End and shows that time, and the predicted duration, in the details panel alongside Good / Goal and Pieces to Goal.

The forecast is worked out from the job's own goal count and the rate it is actually running at: the pieces still to make, multiplied by the time each one is currently taking. It needs nothing but the Job channel - there is no need to turn on Scheduled Job, and a job with no schedule behind it is forecast just the same. Progress counts the whole run, not just the part visible on screen, so a job that started before the window you are looking at is still forecast correctly.

Pulse would rather show you nothing than a number it cannot stand behind, so the prediction disappears when it would be guesswork: when the machine has stopped (something newer than the job has been recorded for it), when a later job or changeover already follows it, when the window you are looking at does not include right now, or when there is no usable goal or rate yet.

From a bar to the raw rows. Right-click any event on the timeline and pick Drill into a dataset - or use the Drill in button in the details panel - to open Data Export with that event's device and time window already filled in. It is the fastest way to get from "that bar looks wrong" to the records behind it.

Day at a Glance takes a single device and lays out its entire day in one view - the timeline, plus the summaries that turn it into a story.

Below the timeline you get, all for the same day:

• State Summary - the split of the day between Running, Down, and Meal/Break, as a single proportional bar.
• Cycle Summary - the same treatment for cycles: Run Cycles, Small Stops, and Partial Cycles, by the time each accounts for.
• Instant chart - the day plotted across time, so you can see exactly when things dipped. Chart Type picks what it plots: OEE, Good/Reject, Cycles, or Cycle Time.
• Two Pareto charts - lost time by reason, and number of occurrences by reason, so the biggest problems sort themselves to the top.

The Options on the left let you show or hide any of these and choose the chart type. There is no aggregation setting to get wrong: Pulse sizes the buckets to the width of the chart on your screen, so the shape stays readable whatever the window. Show Comments brings the day's notes in alongside the charts, and the Pareto charts can be narrowed with Include Unplanned Stop, Include Planned Stop, and Include Not Scheduled.

The Cycles chart type is the one worth knowing about. It stacks Run Cycles, Small Stops, Partial Cycles, and Slow Cycles across the day. Slow Cycles are the ones that completed but took longer than the ideal cycle time, which is exactly the loss that never shows up as downtime. Where Pulse has no slow-cycle figure for a period, the chart labels it Unclassified rather than counting it as good time.

Employee Punch Timeline (under Dashboards) answers the question the production timeline cannot: who was on the machine when that happened? It draws the same job, shift and state bands you already know, and adds a row per operator role underneath - Primary, Secondary, Maintenance, and Other - showing who was clocked on and for how long.

A few things worth knowing:

• Punches are independent of jobs. An operator who stays on through a job change reads as one continuous punch, not two.
• Where two people overlap in the same role, their punches stack into separate lanes rather than hiding one another.
• A punch with no clock-out yet runs to the current time, so an open shift looks open rather than looking like a gap.

The same names appear in the Dashboard's details panel under Employees, so you can also pick them up without leaving the timeline.

Comments are how Pulse captures the why behind the numbers - the note an operator leaves on a downtime, the context a supervisor adds to a rough shift. The Comments Report (under Reports) is where they all come together.

Comments are grouped into threads tied to what they're about - a job, a shift, a downtime event - and you can reply to build a conversation. On the left, the Event Types filter narrows to just the kinds of events you care about (Job, Shift, Downtime / Process State, Part, Team, and more), and the Time Filter picks the window by when the comment was written.

Across the top you can search the comment text, sort (most recent activity, and so on), and Export the set you're looking at.

Comment Analysis. The panel on the right reads the comments currently in view and tells you what is in them, so a few hundred notes become something you can act on. It works on exactly the set you have filtered to - it says how many comments that is - and nothing runs until you click Run analysis. Change a filter afterwards and it tells you the result is stale and offers to re-run.

Standard analysis runs entirely inside your own system, and gives you:

• Overview - how many comments were analyzed, and how many were blank.
• Sentiment - the split between positive, neutral and negative. Pulse labels this a rough lexical estimate rather than a precise measure of mood, and you should read it that way.
• Top terms and Top phrases - the words and word-pairs that keep coming up.
• Themes and Reason-code matches - recurring subjects, and where the wording lines up with your own downtime reason codes. Each theme carries how many comments it covers and quotes one of them, so you can see what the label actually means.
• By device, By event type and By author - who and what the comments cluster around.

AI mode is a second button next to Standard, and it answers a different question. Instead of counting words it reads the comments and writes back:

• a Summary in prose - what happened across this set of comments;
• Themes it found, described rather than tallied;
• Moods, which catch the tone that word-counting misses;
• Notable comments - the individual notes it thinks you should actually read.

Every AI result carries the line "Generated by AI from the comments in view", because it is a reading of your comments rather than a measurement of them. Treat it as a well-informed colleague's summary: quick, usually right about the shape of things, and worth checking against the comments themselves before you quote it.

A line display is Pulse on a screen bolted to the line itself, for the people running it. It shows that one line's timeline and one thing else: a comment box. There is no menu, no filter panel, no links, and nothing to click that would take the screen somewhere else. Whoever is standing in front of it can read what the line has been doing and explain a stop. That is the whole surface.

Opening one. From the Dashboard, pick the single device the screen belongs to, then choose Open line display under Utility. It opens in a new tab already pointed at that device. The address it opens is an ordinary Pulse address with kiosk=1 in it, so you can save it as the screen's home page, put it in a browser shortcut, or hand it to whoever sets the machine up.

One screen, one line. A line display shows exactly one device, and the device is named in the address. If the address names none or more than one, the screen says so and shows nothing else rather than guessing - a wall display quietly showing the wrong line is worse than one that tells you it is misconfigured.

Every screen looks the same. A line display ignores whatever filters that browser happens to have saved, and it never writes its own back. Two screens given the same style of address show the same thing, so a display does not slowly drift into a private layout because somebody once changed a filter on it. It also leaves your own saved filters alone if you open one from your own browser.

It keeps up on its own. Unless the address says otherwise, a line display shows a rolling twelve-hour window that advances by itself. Nobody has to touch the screen at shift change. If you do want a different window - a fixed shift, a specific range - the ordinary Dashboard time settings work in the address and override the default.

Comments. The strip along the bottom is always there. It is attached to the most recent state the machine was in, and names it: when it started, what state it was, and the downtime reason if there is one. An operator types what happened and presses the button, and it appears straight away. Clicking a different bar on the timeline moves the strip to that event, so a stop from earlier in the shift can be explained too.

These are ordinary Pulse comments. They show up in the Comments Report, in the Dashboard, and everywhere else comments appear - the line display is just a different way in.

Plan Realization answers a single question: are we on track to hit the plan? It lines up actual production against the schedule so you can see, in the moment, whether a line is ahead, behind, or on pace - and react while the shift is still running rather than after it.

Alerts is how Pulse tells people when something needs attention - without anyone having to sit and watch a screen. Each alert is a rule that watches your devices for a condition and notifies the right people when it happens.

The list shows one row per rule. For each one you see:

• Alert - its name and what it watches, such as machine down too long, a metric crossing a threshold, or end of a shift.
• Status - Firing (in red) means the condition is active right now; Off means the rule is paused.
• Sends to - where the notification goes (for example, email - 2 recipients).

Use New alert to add a rule, Edit to change one, and the trash icon to remove it. The Activity tab at the top switches to a history of what has fired and when.

Building one. New alert opens a form written in plain language rather than as a settings page. You name it, then work down the sections in order:

• Which devices to watch.
• When this happens - the trigger. Five kinds: Time in a state (a device stays in a state past your limit), Board stops reporting (an active V2 Vorne board misses reports), Metric drops (OEE, Availability, Performance or Quality falls below a number), Shift change, and Scheduled time (a recurring time of day). Only when adds the optional extra conditions.

Board stops reporting is available when the client has enabled the board-offline alert feature. Its timer starts after the first failed collector poll, and a healthy poll clears the alert. It covers active V2 Vorne boards; it does not detect a collector that has stopped completely, which requires separate heartbeat data.

• Message - what recipients receive.
• Recipients - who gets it.
• Channels - how it reaches them. Advertised send methods deliver today: Email, SMS, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Push, and an in-app banner inside Pulse itself. Pick the channel that matches how each recipient actually watches the floor.
• How often - fire once, or repeat every so many minutes while the condition holds.

Which devices is worth a moment. You can watch every device, or watch a level of your hierarchy - all plants, or a named set of lines - so a machine added next month is covered by the rule you wrote today without anyone remembering to come back. Except these devices takes the stragglers back out.

The Advanced switch at the top of the form adds the rest: any/all grouping of conditions, per-channel options, time windows, and the all-clear notice that follows up when a condition clears.

Sending alerts to Microsoft Teams. Pick one or more Teams channels for a rule and the alert lands in them as well as in anyone's inbox. The channels come from a registry you maintain once, under Alerts on the Channels tab, rather than being retyped into every rule - so if no channels are offered yet, that is where to add the first one. If a channel a rule was using is later deleted from the registry, Pulse tells you on the rule rather than quietly dropping the delivery.

Teams retired its classic Incoming Webhook connector in May 2026, so a channel is registered with a Workflows webhook URL instead. The Channels tab links a walkthrough for getting one.

The Reports menu holds Pulse's structured, printable reports. Most share the same left-hand filters - Devices, Shifts, a Time Filter, and an Export button - and each one answers a different question. They fall into three families: OEE reports, production reports, and the loss/recap reports.

OEE reports - how efficiently are we running?

• Shift OEE is the full breakdown for a shift: the three OEE components (Availability, Performance, Quality) and the combined OEE %, the split of the shift's time (Run, Unplanned Stop, Planned Stop, Not Scheduled), productivity counts, a 7-day OEE trend, and the shift's biggest lost-time events.
• Shift OEE Status shows those same shift numbers in an at-a-glance layout - a large OEE % front and center with Availability / Performance / Quality beside it, plus a Last Week vs. This Week comparison. Built for a quick "how's this shift doing?" read rather than deep analysis.
• Line OEE rolls the same OEE picture up to a whole line (every device on it) over a date range, so you can judge a line's overall performance instead of one machine.
• Line OEE Status is the line-level at-a-glance version - the production-time and performance summary for the line.
• OEE Waterfall takes the same numbers and walks them downhill: a waterfall chart from total time down to OEE, with a bar for each reason code that took a bite out of it, plus the headline figures and a summary underneath. It answers "where did the rest of the time go?" in one picture. It builds a snapshot from your current filters and tells you when the snapshot is behind them, so refresh it after changing a filter.

Production reports - what did we actually make?

• Shift Production is the detailed production report for the device(s) you pick, broken out shift by shift: good and reject counts, the output, and the run / stop time behind them. It answers "what did this shift produce?"
• All Shift Production is the plant-wide version - every shift's production across your time range in a single rollup. Pick Shift Only for a compact summary or full detail for everything. Because it can span many pages, Pulse asks before drawing a very large one. Use it to compare output across all shifts at once.

Loss and recap reports.

• Shift Summary is a one-page recap of a single shift: a Target-vs-Actual table (good / reject counts, efficiency, and the OEE components), the production-time split, and the top unplanned-stop reasons. The quickest "how did that shift go?" read.
• Top Losses ranks the biggest sources of lost time side by side across day, week, and month, so chronic problems stand out from one-off bad days.
• The Comments Report (covered earlier under Comments) pulls together every note your team left on jobs, shifts, and downtime.

Put your OEE target on the report.

Every report that draws a 7-day OEE trend can draw your OEE target on it too: a dashed line at the target, and each day's OEE as a bar - green where the day met the target, red where it missed. A day that hit the number exactly counts as meeting it, and a day with no production at all draws no bar rather than a red one.

Open Options on the report and set Target - OEE as a percentage. 70 means 70%. On Shift Summary the OEE target is the one already in its target values, so the recap table and the chart always agree.

The box starts empty, and empty does not mean no target. Pulse falls back to the company-wide OEE figure in Configurator's Metric Targets - the same one Explorer's charts read - and shows it greyed out in the box so you can see what the chart will draw. So a report can arrive with a target line already on it, without anyone typing anything.

What you type is an override for the report in front of you, not a separate setting: it replaces the company number on this report and nowhere else. Clear the box, or set it to 0, and the company target takes over again rather than the line disappearing. Whether higher or lower counts as better always comes from the company target, never from the number you typed.

Reports answer the questions Pulse already knows how to ask. Data Export is for the ones it doesn't: it puts the raw records on screen, lets you filter and arrange them however you need, and hands them over as a file. It is the right tool for a one-off analysis in a spreadsheet, for handing data to somebody else's system, and for checking what really sat behind a number you don't believe.

Four datasets, each on the Data Export menu:

• Metrics - the production metrics behind the timeline and every OEE report: counts, targets, run and lost time, per device, shift, job and state. Start here.
• Rejects - reject records, by reason.
• Job Punches - who was clocked on to what, and when.
• Instants - the raw snapshot stream. This one is enormous, so it arrives with a row limit already set.

Narrowing it down. The left rail carries the filters you already know from the Dashboard - Devices, Hierarchy and the Time Filter - followed by the ones that belong to the dataset in front of you: Shift, Shift Hour, Job, Part, Team, State, Reason, Reject Reason, Employee. The job filter searches rather than making you scroll. Above the table, a single Search box matches across every column at once.

The table pages and sorts as you would expect, and the page's address carries your filters, so a view worth keeping is worth bookmarking or pasting to a colleague.

Choosing columns. Every dataset opens with a sensible default set. Under Columns you can add, remove and reorder them - the order in the selected list is the order they appear in the file - and Reset to default columns puts it all back.

Two extra groups are there when you need them and out of the way when you don't: Include hidden Vorne fields and Include hidden IntelliSuite IDs. They add the raw identifiers and source fields that matter when you are reconciling against another system, and matter to nobody else.

Getting the file. Pick a Format - CSV, Excel or PDF - and press Export.

• Excel is the one to choose for analysis, and the only sensible choice for a wide table.
• PDF is for sending someone a fixed document. A wide table has to be split into repeated column bands to fit the page, so Pulse warns you first and suggests Excel instead. PDFs are also built one at a time, so a large one may wait behind somebody else's.
• Every export stops at the Row limit shown on the page, and the server will not go past 100,000 rows whatever you ask for. The note under the table says so plainly: if more rows match your filters, the file stops at the limit and is not the complete result set. Tighten the filters rather than trusting the first 100,000 rows.

The Comparison Tool (under Utility) puts two or more devices - or two time periods - side by side, so you can answer "which line is doing better, and where's the gap?" without flipping between dashboards.

The Settings menu is where Pulse is configured - mostly a one-time or occasional job for a supervisor or admin. These pages decide who gets told what, and when, and feed the rules you see under Alerts.

• Shift Emails - automatic shift-summary emails: who receives them and for which shifts.
• Master Downtimes - email rules tied to downtime events, so the right people hear when a machine goes down for the wrong reason.
• Notification Rules - the powerful one: build custom rules that fire on specific events (a state, a reason, a threshold) and route a notification to the right place. Add and edit rules as your floor's needs change.
• Notification Settings - the admin page tying notifications and email together (channels, defaults).
• Anomaly Detection - settings for Pulse's automatic spotting of unusual production patterns.
• Bulk Edit - make the same change across many records at once, instead of editing them one by one.

Pulse renders cleanly in both light and dark - use the sun/moon button in the top-right to switch. The same Dashboard, two looks: