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.

Integrating Scales: Not That Easy

Here we are about 5 weeks since MES got approved and purchased and I have good news and bad news.

Good News: It was pretty easy to get the basic features of the product up and running in the application. Pretty much you run a couple concurrent requests, setup a few items as dispensable, setup a dispensing area and a dispensing booth and there you go. Okay, maybe its a little more complex then that but not by much.

Bad News: We use scales from Mettler Toledo. A few years ago we purchased their ID30 weigh station solution which is essentially a scale, a monitor, what they call an 'indicator', and a little pc. The monitor runs their ScaleXplorer software which uses an ActiveX control to communicate with the scales.

This week I spoke with Mettler about how to use their scales with MES and the answer is that we still have to use their ELO box (which is the indicator and the little pc) but in order to use them on a network we would have to write a listening app and install it on each ELO box and then also write an app that would use the ActiveX control to communicate with the scales. (FYI I'm not a developer nor do I do much with networks so I'm definitely pushing past anything I know and understand).

So here we are today. We have some internal developers who could probably create these two apps for us but they are swamped with other projects right now and probably wouldn't be able to get to it for another couple months. Next option is to check out a product offered by Kepware which an Oracle developer recommended that apparently is an all in one solution for integrating devices with MES. If that doesn't work or is too expensive I guess I go back to Mettler and see what they can offer.

Wish me luck.


Interesting Article on the different philosophies of Oracle and SAP pertaining to manufacturing execution systems.

A Quick Oracle MES Implementation Update

The past two weeks I've been working to get a quick setup done of MES so that I can show the MFG departments what to expect, unfortunately my expectations were a bit unrealistic in terms of the simplicity of the setup. I had only minor issues getting the module to work in the application but now we are getting to the device integration and that has turned out to be a rather complex process.

Let me walk you through a little bit of the problem we are facing. Last June we had an Oracle employee come out and look at our scales and how they were hooked up to see if we would need to change anything when we got to the point of implementing MES. His findings were that things looked good and the transition would be very smooth.

Fast forward nine months and it turns out our scales can't communicate via TCP/IP. I had a phone call with Oracle to get a better understanding and what I think I learned is that in order for a scale (or any device) to communicate with MES it has to be assigned its own IP address. The device setup must mimic the setup required for a device to function in WCS (there is a white paper from July 2006 called Oracle Warehouse Management System Warehouse Control System (WCS)/Material Handling Equipment (MHE)that goes over the requirements and the setup process). Basically the communication goes from the database to a middle tier which they reference as the 'Carousel Bridge' or Carbri which then communicates with the device simulator and in order for that communication to take place Carbri must know 'where' it needs to send its messages thus the need for an IP address.

So our current scales come from Mettler Toledo, we use the ID30 weigh system which connects a scale and a monitor via what they call an ELO box. The connection from the scale to this box isn't via a serial cable or usb connection, its hardwired which makes our transition to MES a little more difficult because I can't simply unplug the scale from the ELO box and plug it into something else.

Anyway, the next week or so I'm hoping we can figure out the setup and integration of these scales so we can move forward with the MES project as a whole.

--The minor issue we had with setting up the MES module was that when we tried to select an item for dispensing the system said the lot status was invalid even though it was not. We worked with Oracle for about a week and they came up with patch 9472114 which resolved the issue.