Engineering Accomplishments
IST works with several different industrial controls. These include, but are not limited to, Programmable Logics Controllers (PLC), Computer Numeric Controls (CNC) and various Embedded Controllers. We interface Personal Computers (PC) running Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP applications to various peripheral devices. Some of this hardware includes PLC’s (serial or Ethernet), scanners, scales, light curtains (or equivalent), inkjet printers (printing on cartons), label printers (some affixing directly to the carton), radio frequency (RF) equipment, host mainframes (3270 sessions) and even SAP.
Our work with PLC’s includes Allen Bradley’s PLC 2/30, PLC 5/40’s, SLC500’s MicroLogix 1000 and Siemen’s SIMATIC TI controllers. Sorters, merge areas, elevators and CNC machine centers are just some of the control issues we manage using PLC’s.
The most common peripheral devices are scanners. IST works extensively on scanning systems. We utilize one scanner (overhead or side), dual scanners reading the same label, one or more scanners reading multiple labels and even tunnel scanners reading up to five of the six sides of a carton. We also employ RF scanners from Teklogix, Dolphin, Accusort and Symbol to control traffic inside warehouses (particularly on HiLo vehicles), manage inventory and validate product at docks.
Scales are another hardware device that we incorporate into our engineering projects. In our applications we weigh cartons entering a conveyor sorter area then use the measured weight input to calculate carrier freight. Ocassionally our applications use light curtains (or Accusort’s Accu-Ranger) to measure carton(s) for safety and accuracy. As we measure the carton(s) stack height entering a sortation system we verify that the scanning system reads all of the labels in the stack using a database with product dimensions. In addition we are able to interface with label printers to affix labels to cartons and even use inkjet printers to print specific information directly onto cartons.
IST has created an extensive interface to SAP from Windows applications. This interface interacts with SAP for the purpose of sending data to and gathering data from SAP. Our interface includes remote function calls (RFC) to retrieve data and a transactional remote function call (TRFC) to deliver IDOCS to SAP. We also have a TRFC server that will accept downloads from SAP.
Over the past 12 years we have been working with several customers in developing and maintaining warehouse managements systems (WMS). These are PC based systems that interface to host computers (FTP, 3270 session, TRFC), scanners, printers and RF equipment. WMS will manage the inventory within the warehouse (shipping, receiving, repairing, and inventory reconciliation) as well as manage carriers, carrier equipment (trucks) and log user/trip/order activity for management reporting.
Our engineering and design work is not limited to large-scale warehouse applications. We have also designed controls for various smaller custom applications. For example, cutoff saws, dryer statistical systems, production monitoring system and much more.