Making Progress With MES

It's been a little bit since I've posted anything about our MES project so I thought I ought to try and give an update as to where we currently stand. Back in April I talked about how the hardware that we had was making it extremely difficult to get the scales integrated and functioning with Oracle. There were a couple reasons for that:

1st: The Mettler ID30 product that we own is considered and marketed as a complete dispensing solution and as such Mettler makes it extremely difficult to use the ID30 in any way other than as an end to end dispensing solution. We tried for a couple of weeks to figure out how to send and receive messages from the ID30 but in the end it would have taken much more effort than we felt it was worth. One example showing the difficulty of using the ID30 is, without going into too much detail, the ID30 uses an activeX control to communicate with the scales, in order to pass commands from Oracle to the scale you would have to use the existing activeX commands which meant we would have to develop our own internal application to send and receive information.

2nd: The WMS module is something that wasn't available to OPM customers until release 12 so there was definitely a learning curve on our side as to how setup a device to communicate with Oracle. So in my post back in April I mentioned the possibility of working with Kepware to help us get MES setup but as we looked into their product offering a little more we realized that it didn't make much sense to continue down that path. The reason for this is that the basic request to weigh a product would initiate from an Oracle form via a button push or something like that. Once the button is pushed a request is sent to WMS that essentially says 'talk to the scale'. WMS sends a message to the scale and then receives the response and then that response is entered back into the Oracle form. Well, regardless if you're using WMS or Kepware the process is exactly the same and since we are only sending 1 request (read the scale weight) it seemed really foolish to spend a couple thousand dollars to have a company do that for us.

Those were two of the big issues we've had to deal with as we've moved down this MES path. What we decided to do to get around the ID30 is we've gone ahead and purchased a new indicator (the hardware that is used to view the output from the scales and which connects to the netword) from Mettler Toledo, the model we purchased is the IND780. It's much more user friendly because it was designed to send and receive messages from other sources. We just recently received this product so I'm in the process of setting it up to communicate with the scales and with WMS in a TEST instance.

Hopefully we can get this TEST instance up and running quickly, we are pretty anxious to get the solution in place and replace the formweigh system we currently are using for dispensing.