Quickstart: set up a new organization

The first week of a new IoTFlows organization, in the order the steps have to happen.

An organization is the container IoTFlows creates for your company. Every machine, member, team, and report belongs to exactly one. IoTFlows creates it for you: there is no self-serve signup, so if you do not have one yet, contact IoTFlows and come back once it exists.

Before you start. You need to be signed in as an Organization Owner, the role IoTFlows bills, or an Organization Administrator, which has the same authority minus billing. See Roles and permissions.

1. Set your organization profile

Open Settings → Organization at /settings/organization. The Organization section at the top of the Settings tab carries everything that identifies your company across IoTFlows.

1. Select Edit at the top right of the section.
2. Select the Organization logo tile and upload a square image. It appears in the organization switcher and on shared reports.
3. Set Organization name to the name your team says out loud, for example Midwest Tooling.
4. Set Organization handle, the short identifier used to find you in chat.
5. Add an Organization description if you want one. It is optional.
6. Select Save. An "Organization modified" toast confirms the change.

The handle field takes lowercase letters, digits, and underscores, and drops anything else as you type, so Midwest Tooling! leaves midwesttooling. Half a second after you stop typing, IoTFlows marks the field with a green check if the handle is free and a red icon if it is taken. Save is not blocked by the red icon, so check it first.

The organization profile, as an admin sees it on day one.

Pick the handle you want now. Changing it later changes it for every member and rewrites every chat handle with it, in the form user:midwesttooling, which breaks the way people outside your company already find you.

2. Set the timezone

Scroll to the Schedules section on the same screen and select its Edit button. Schedule Timezone is a dropdown of named zones, for example (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time.

Pick the zone the plant runs on, not the one you are reading this in. IoTFlows uses it to decide which day and which shift a stop, a cycle, or a part count belongs to, so a machine in Ohio reporting under a Pacific zone credits its evening output to the wrong day.

Do not select Save yet: the section saves the timezone and the shifts together, so set the shifts first.

Set the timezone before you add a machine. It buckets data as it arrives.

3. Define your shifts

A shift is a named block of hours on named days, for example Day, 06:00 to 14:00, Monday through Friday. Shifts drive the shift filters on reports, the Shift Production view, and the start-of-shift and end-of-shift auto-downtime rules.

Still in Edit on the Schedules section:

1. Enter a name in Shift Name, for example Day.
2. Check the days the shift runs. The checkboxes are Monday through Sunday.
3. Set Shift Start and Shift End on the two time pickers.
4. Select Add another shift and repeat for each remaining shift.
5. Select Save. A "Work shifts modified" toast confirms both the shifts and the timezone.

Shifts cannot overlap in time, which the section states under Work Schedule. Three shifts covering a 24-hour day are Day 06:00 to 14:00, Afternoon 14:00 to 22:00, and Night 22:00 to 06:00.

Three shifts cover the weekday around the clock, and a fourth covers the weekend.

You do not need a shift for every pattern a person works. One shift per block of plant hours is enough, because shifts describe when the machines run, not who is standing at them. Overnight and weekend coverage is on Define shifts and your timezone.

4. Invite your team

Open Members at /members and select Add Member. The modal handles both cases from one search field: someone who has never used IoTFlows, and someone who already has an account.

1. Type an email address, a username, or a name into the search field.
2. For an existing IoTFlows user, select their row in the results. For a new person, select the emailed-invite row the modal offers once the address is valid.
3. Choose a role under Select organization role for member.
4. Select Send invite for an emailed invite, or Confirm Add for an existing user.

An invite reports "Invite has been sent"; adding an existing user reports "Member has been added". If you see "This email is already a member or has a pending invite in this organization", look for that person's pending invite in the directory rather than sending a second one. Invite people to your organization covers resending and canceling.

Inviting your first members and choosing their role.

5. Assign roles

A role is the set of actions a person can take across the whole organization, and everyone has exactly one. You choose it as you invite them, and you can change it afterward from the directory.

For a first setup, this is the split that works:

• Organization Administrator for the one or two people who will add machines, tune calibration, and manage everyone else.
• Organization Member for operators and supervisors.
• Organization Observer for anyone who only reads, such as a customer or an executive.

Give operators Organization Member, not Observer. An Observer cannot classify downtime, and unclassified downtime makes a downtime report useless: the hours are recorded, but nothing says whether they were a tool change or a breakdown.

You do not need a second Owner. Owner is the billing and ownership-transfer role, and an Administrator can do everything else. The full table is on Roles and permissions, and a role is separate from machine access, which decides which machines a person sees.

The directory once your team is in.

6. Add your machines

Add one asset for each physical machine you want to watch, and name it the way the floor names it, for example Haas VF-2 rather than CNC 3. Add a machine covers the dialog, including the machine type and the cycle settings that follow from it.

Sensors are not something you pair yourself. Contact IoTFlows to tie your sensors to an asset; this normally happens during onboarding. See Get support.

Start with the two or three machines that hurt when they stop, confirm their data looks right for a shift, then add the rest.

7. What to do in week two

Once machines are reporting, the rest of the setup is worth doing with real data in front of you:

• Build your downtime categories out of the reasons operators actually give, then turn on auto-downtime rules so nobody classifies the obvious stops.
• Set uptime goals from the first week of measurement, not from a number named in a meeting.
• Turn on alerts for the machines that matter, and install the mobile app for whoever carries the pager.
• Put a wallboard on the floor, and set up an operator station at any machine where operators classify their own downtime.
• Group people into teams, and check billing if you are the Owner.

See also

• Define shifts and your timezone
• Invite people to your organization
• Roles and permissions
• Add a machine
• Overview: administer your organization