WES Control Tower: watch devices, queues and due-time risk on one screen
The Control Tower is the WES app home screen: a device wall, throughput KPIs, station queues, due-time risk and the automation switch status, refreshed live.
Open the app switcher and choose WES, and you land on the Control Tower (WES → Control Tower). Everything about warehouse automation for the selected warehouse is on this one screen, and it updates by itself as devices report back, with a check every 30 seconds — you never need to refresh the page to trust what you see.
Read the screen in one pass#
- The warehouse is picked once, in the top bar — the switcher next to the app name. Every WES page follows that one choice, this page included: switch the warehouse up top and every number below switches with it.
- Read the KPI row: jobs in queue, completed in the last 24 hours with the per-hour rate, tasks at due-time risk, average device use, fault rate and rerouted jobs (including how many were handed to people).
- Scan the device wall: each card is one device — its state color, station, how many jobs it is carrying, and a “Simulated” badge when it is a simulator device. The badge is information only; simulated and real devices work the same way here.
- Check the station queues and the due-time panel: the longest queue bar is your bottleneck, and overdue / due-in-1-hour tasks are the ones to act on first.
The automation switch banner#
If automation is paused — for the whole company or just this warehouse — a red banner says so, with the reason and when it happened; while paused, no new device jobs are dispatched and work continues by hand. To pause or resume, go to WES → Automation and do it there with a reason; the Control Tower only shows the state. If the banner says the switch status could not be read, automation keeps running as if not paused — tell an admin if it keeps showing.
How fresh is the data on this screen?#
Freshness here is measured, not assumed: every device sends a heartbeat or events as it works, and the tower counts how long ago the latest one arrived — each device card shows the age of its data. If a device goes quiet for over a minute, its data is marked stale; if it stays quiet past the heartbeat timeout (5 minutes by default), the card shows offline, even if its last known state looked fine. When any device on the wall is stale or offline, the freshness note at the top of the tower says so instead of claiming everything is live. A stale or offline card usually means the device or its Device Hub lost connection — check the device and its Hub first.
Below the numbers, the Job list shows every device job for the warehouse selected in the top bar — newest first: the job number and what it asks the device to do, the device and station, its status, the failure reason right in the list when a job failed, what it belongs to (a task, a wave or a consolidation batch), when it was created, the linked task’s due time with an at-risk tag, and when it finished. Click any row to open its details: everything about that job, plus its event timeline from acceptance to completion (or failure). Narrow the list with the status and device dropdowns; if a job belongs to a demo run, click its run ID in the list to filter the whole tower to that run. The list refreshes together with the rest of the tower, and pages 20 at a time. Nothing here yet? Jobs appear once orchestration sends work to a device, or after you start a round on the Demo page.