Manufacturing Intelligence: Building Daniel-Son from the Factory Floor Up

For nine years at Mars Inc., I’ve managed integrated facilities across 47 sites, overseeing 8,700+ assets. I’ve seen what happens when manufacturing intelligence is done right - and what happens when it’s not. That experience led me to build Daniel-Son, a production-ready SaaS platform for real-time factory monitoring.

The OEE Problem

If you’ve worked in manufacturing, you know OEE - Overall Equipment Effectiveness. It’s the gold standard metric: Availability × Performance × Quality. Simple formula, complex reality.

The problem isn’t measuring OEE. The problem is measuring it accurately, in real-time, in a way that actually drives decisions.

Most factory floors I’ve seen have one of two problems:

1. Paper-based tracking - Someone writes down numbers at shift end, enters them into Excel the next day, and by the time anyone sees the data, the opportunity to act is gone.
2. Expensive enterprise systems - Massive implementations that cost millions, take years to deploy, and still don’t give operators what they need in the moment.

Daniel-Son sits in the middle: production-ready software that operators can actually use, without the enterprise price tag or implementation timeline.

Building for the Factory Floor

The most important design decision in Daniel-Son wasn’t technical - it was empathetic. Factory operators don’t sit at desks. They’re on their feet, often wearing gloves, usually in a hurry. Whatever I built had to work for them.

That led to several design principles:

Touch-First Interface: Every interaction is designed for touchscreens. Large buttons. Minimal typing. Barcode scanning for equipment selection.

Offline-First Architecture: WiFi on factory floors is notoriously unreliable. Daniel-Son uses IndexedDB for local storage and syncs when connectivity returns. Data entry never stops.

Shift Context: Everything is organized around shifts, because that’s how factory workers think. When did the shift start? What’s our current OEE? How does it compare to last shift?

Real-Time Feedback: When an operator logs a downtime event, they see immediately how it affects OEE. That instant feedback changes behavior.

The Technical Stack

Daniel-Son is built with modern edge technology:

Frontend (126 React Components)

• React 18 with TypeScript (strict mode)
• Zustand for state management
• Recharts for data visualization
• Tailwind CSS for styling
• Service Worker + IndexedDB for offline capability

Backend (Cloudflare Edge)

• Cloudflare Workers for serverless API
• Hono framework for routing
• D1 (SQLite) for database
• Durable Objects for real-time WebSocket coordination

The edge architecture matters. When an operator in Mexico logs a downtime event, they’re hitting a Cloudflare edge node nearby, not a data center in Virginia. Latency is measured in milliseconds, not seconds.

Features by Role

Manufacturing organizations have distinct personas, and Daniel-Son serves each differently:

For Operators

• Real-time shift dashboard with current OEE
• One-tap downtime event logging
• Quality issue reporting with severity levels
• Production counter
• Barcode scanning for equipment

For Supervisors

• Multi-shift analytics
• Pareto charts for downtime causes
• Quality breakdown analysis
• Real-time production board (the “andon” concept)
• Downtime waterfall visualization

For Managers

• Executive summary KPI cards
• 6-month OEE forecasting
• Line performance ranking
• Trend analysis across all equipment
• Report builder with export

For Administrators

• Equipment configuration
• Loss code builder
• Shift template management
• User permissions
• CSV import/export
• Audit logging

Why “Daniel-Son”?

The name is a deliberate reference to “The Karate Kid” - Mr. Miyagi’s student who learns that mastery comes from disciplined fundamentals. Wax on, wax off.

Manufacturing intelligence works the same way. The companies with the best OEE aren’t the ones with the fanciest systems. They’re the ones that nail the fundamentals: accurate data capture, consistent processes, disciplined follow-through.

Daniel-Son is designed to make those fundamentals easy.

Lessons from the Factory Floor

Nine years of managing facilities taught me things you don’t learn in software tutorials:

Data Accuracy Beats Data Volume: A factory that accurately captures 5 key metrics beats one that inaccurately captures 50. Daniel-Son focuses on getting the essential data right.

Operators Must Trust the System: If operators don’t believe the data is accurate, they won’t use the system. Every feature is designed to build that trust.

Mobile Isn’t Optional: Workers aren’t at desks. If it doesn’t work on a tablet or phone, it doesn’t work.

Offline Happens: Network failures are normal in industrial environments. The system must keep working.

Speed Matters: When you’re in the middle of a production run, you don’t have 30 seconds to log an event. You have 3.

The Power BI Connection

At Mars, I built Power BI dashboards that drove 14% efficiency improvement (SAE: 74.6% to 84.8%). Daniel-Son is essentially the next evolution of that work - taking the dashboard concept and making it available to any manufacturer, with real-time data entry built in.

The dashboards I built at Mars required manual data input from multiple sources. Daniel-Son closes that loop - operators enter data on the floor, and it flows immediately to the dashboards.

What’s Next

Daniel-Son is production-ready with 126 components, zero TypeScript errors, and full offline support. The next phase is pilot deployments with manufacturing partners.

If you’re running a factory and tired of spreadsheet-based OEE tracking, I’d love to talk. The whole point of building this is to solve real problems for real manufacturers.

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Daniel-Son is available on GitHub at github.com/jrc1883/Daniel-Son. If you’re interested in a pilot deployment or just want to see a demo, reach out on LinkedIn.