Focus and Happiness

Just read an article that I really enjoyed. The article, Will Focus Make You Happier, talks about how when someone is focused on a task they tend to be happier than when they are kind of floundering. I found this article to describe my mood at work to a T. When I am focused/invested/engaged in what I'm doing I find that I am much happier than when I'm not. It's interesting, though, that I often find it very difficult to get myself engaged in a new project. It's hard to find the energy to get things started but after reading this article is seems like by not investing my energy and focus into projects I'm keeping myself from being as happy at my job. Overall, just kind of a really interesting article.

Another article on our upgrade

After writing the two articles for OAUG Insight about our upgrade to release 12 I was contacted by SearchOracle.com to see if I would be willing to write a similar high level summary for their website. Well, that summary is finished and can be found HERE. It is basically just the process we went through to upgrade our system to release 12. If you have any specific questions about that process feel free to contact me (I'll respond to any comments I see on this post).

How Will You Measure Your Life: An article from a Harvard Professor

I read an incredible article this past week in the Harvard Business Review that outlines ideas on how to live your life. Its a completely refreshing view about how there is so much more to life than simply climbing to the top of the 'ladder' and collecting gobs of cash along the way.

I particularly enjoyed the authors view on allocating your personal resources appropriately and consciously creating a culture in your personal life instead of letting circumstances and lack of attention create a culture for you.

I highly recommend reading this article.

How Will You Measure Your Life

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.

Our Upgrade Story

This past year I was contacted by the publisher of OAUG Insight magazine and was asked if I would be willing to write an article about our experience upgrading from 11.5.10 to R12. My original article was to long and so the editor asked if we could split it into two parts. Part one covers how USANA went about upgrading to Release12 and part two details some of the functional issues to watch out for after migrating.

Part One: Page 18

Part Two: Page 15

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.

My Oracle Support Community...

During an OPM SIG conference call (held monthly to discuss different issues or topics that the group is facing) Russ Bayless got on and suggested that we all check out this 'cool new' Oracle Support Community feature found on metalink...I mean found on 'My Oracle Support'. He said the intention was to create a forum (much like it.toolbox) where users would be able to help each other not only with technical questions that you'd normally submit to oracle support but also with setup and operation questions that might be specific to each company.

I liked the idea of this, especially since the Process Manufacturing Community is so small, so I created a profile and signed up for some of the 'communities' on the site. Well, it's been a month and a half now and I'm definitely not impressed. I think the biggest problem is that users don't know about this feature and so there are very few people reviewing questions and forums (ie there is not much participation). I've submitted 7 different questions and have had 0 usable responses so far.

I'm writing this blog post to vent a little I guess but also to make others aware of this feature offered by Oracle. If we can get more people on board it will definitely increase participation. For me, IT Toolbox has been a great resource for very technical oracle issue but not such a good resource for day to day usage like creating approver groups in AME, or finding help understanding supply tolerancing. My hope is that somewhere, either on IT Toolbox or on My Oracle Support Community, I can find a forum where I can get more participation and answers to operational questions.

Here is the link to 'My Oracle Support Community'. You do have to have a user name and password to log in but its the same as you would use to log into metalink.