Press Room

Starthis Releases RFID Driven Manufacturing Solution

Company Transforms RFID ‘reads’ Into Process Control ‘writes’
for High Speed Food Packaging Requirements

ORLANDO, FL (February 22, 2006) - Starthis, Inc, the leading provider of SOA compliant industrial automation middleware announces the successful completion of the initial production pilot of their ‘RFID Driven Manufacturing Strategy’ at a major Food Processing and Packaging company in North America.

Facing new RFID compliance requirements from their major retail customers, yet wanting to hopefully derive benefits beyond the cost of mere RFID compliance, the client’s Production and IT Managers got together and began by looking beyond the ‘slap and ship’ offerings they were being presented.

‘Automatically change production processes based on the identity of the product being produced’

‘Use RFID ‘tags’ to create and print new individual carton labels during production’

‘Use RFID product identification to track production process quality?’

The IT team was pulling for open software standards and the Production team was focusing on performance. They chose the open SOA architecture of the Starthis iTapestry suite which would enable rapid integration with both the RFID middleware and Material Handling Execution Systems application they needed to meet the client’s complex real time production requirements, while still delivering open connectivity to the rest of the IT infrastructure.

Initial efforts using previous technological approaches were not as open architecturally and thus were too convoluted to meet the client’s performance requirements:

‘We needed to know that the RFID tags were going to be converted and written to the PLC within 40 milliseconds or production would have to stop. We tried OPC, but only Starthis could consistently meet our requirement.’

Now that the first phase of the pilot has completed, the open ‘services oriented architecture’ will also help the client in completing the second phase of the project – extending production status, especially any production exceptions handling, to all other business units needing information access:

• Plant controls
• Operations personnel
• Business systems
• Key decision-makers
• ‘Service Object’ to CRM
• ‘Service Object’ to SCM

One of the new developments that both the Production and IT managers are focusing on is the recently released Poller Xpress™ business logic module within the iTapestry Suite. A web interfaced ‘polling agent’ wizard which creates a shared portal for managing the information gathering from and delivery to production processes while providing autonomous polling intervals and diverse delivery expressions – JDBC for databases or JMS for messaging. Now both Production and IT personnel will be able to access and deliver real time production information to any business application needed at whatever frequency and within whatever context required.

Manufacturing is an increasingly dynamic environment generating sizable amounts of critical production information that must be moved to and from industrial automation control devices. Data is only valuable when it becomes useable intelligence distributed to the decision-makers with enough speed so that they can take action. iTapestry is an enterprise server based solution providing direct real time access to all plant floor controls devices enabling these production processes to now be registered as ‘services’ within any corporate SOA directory. The iTapestry suite finally facilitates collaboration between IT and Production personnel – the speed manufacturing management demands with the enterprise systems administration tools IT executives require.

About Starthis
SERVICES ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE for MANUFACTURING
The Starthis iTapestry architecture provides industrial automation software tools for managing the real-time flow of production information within your plant and across your enterprise. This is the next step in the Services Oriented Architecture evolution occurring within the other major information solutions areas of any corporation today – CRM, SCM, MES, and ERP. The iTapestry suite of productivity tools provide direct access to data, management of data distribution and integration, work-in-process visibility, security, continuous availability, reporting and monitoring, and interactive operator interfaces. This is the best way to make vital real-time information available to all key decision-makers in the enterprise - whether on the ‘shop floor’ or in the ‘executive suite’. Further information about Starthis is available at www.starthis.com.