"My customers are not single production facilities where everything is within easy reach," says Dr. Serhat Eren, a Six Sigma Black Belt in charge of corporate quality control of a major Tier One supplier to the automotive industry. "I have test stands scattered across the whole country in multiple plants," he adds with a wide gesture of his hands. "And I need to talk to every one of them. But here is the problem," he continues, leaning forward, "I need to talk to them only when they are ready to talk to me!"
Eren is a typical innovator. Behind his calm demeanor and the ever-present smile, he is a hard-charging engineer. When his company gave him the task of creating an automated system to collect quality data from hundreds of test stands for statistical process control, he went to work. The result is a well-designed central data collection and analysis system.
"When you have such widely-dispersed autonomous data centers and a relatively low volume of transmission, unsolicited communications is essential to your design," he says with authority. "And Cyberlogic has delivered an off-the-shelf solution that works very well for that purpose." Eren’s newly designed system uses DHX and MBX OPC Server Suites from Cyberlogic, in Troy, Mich., for remote, unsolicited data collection from vision-based part inspection operations. It allows the corporate quality control systems to monitor hundreds of remote nodes and gather enterprise data with no polling.
Can you hear me now?
"We decided to use Iconics [software] on the client side because of the ease of its integration with our Manufacturing Execution Systems (MESs)," says Eren, "And OPC was crucial in allowing us to pick the right data server to go along with that. [Cyberlogic’s] OPC software allows us to do unsolicited messaging with an unlimited number of remote nodes concurrently. Now that’s powerful stuff, because we never know when or how many test stands may call in at any given time."
Cyberlogic OPC Server Suites are integrated, all-in-one products. The built-in unsolicited messaging feature allows the configuration of an unlimited number of nodes that can initiate unsolicited data transmission. For added reliability, Cyberlogic OPC servers also allow the configuration of redundant networks and backup data sources. The software suites include a Health Monitor that continuously verifies the operation of each network and data source, automatically switching to backups when there is a problem.
"The amazing thing," adds Eren, "is all this programmable logic controller (PLC) data from miles away is coming across the Internet!"
Find out more about Cyberlogic OPC Server Suites at www.cyberlogic.com.
