Projects

• Low cost Small Touch Screen PC's
• Low cost Portable Data Collection terminals

We programmed interfaces for them, allowing them to update either Access or SQL servers.
Programming work has included:

• HMI Interfaces
• Real time capture of production/rejects etc.
• Production of route cards with bar codes
• Displaying CAD drawings on the shop floor

Technologies we are using:

• Touch Screen thin clients
• Terminal servers (Microsoft and Citrix)
• Access and SQL servers
• Portable Data Collection Terminals
• Device Servers

Long term benefits and savings for the company:

• Reduced administration
• Improved productivity
• Smoother flow of data
• Reduced waste, product and labour costs.

We were contacted by a company which uses Mamut business software, who design and supply specialised clothing, to produce a system for generating bar code labels for their product. The client designs and sells the specialised clothing, but sub-contracts the manufacturing of the clothing to third parties. The client sells their products into stores which require that all of the items that are sold are marked with bar codes for identification and stock control purposes.

The client was therefore looking for a system that would produce a set of labels for each of their clothing purchase orders, so that a label would be produced for every garment on the order. The manufacturer is then able to stick the labels to pre-printed clothing tags in order to identify the individual products.

Thompson Partnership produced a program that links into the data in the Mamut Business Software database and displays a list of purchase orders for selection. It then prints sets of labels with a label for each item on the Purchase Order. For ad-hoc labels we also provided the facility to select stock items from a list and print a specified quantity of labels.

The printer we selected to produce the labels was the Zebra Stripe S600, a printer with the built in facility to produce high quality bar codes. Our program prints the product code, the product description and the EAN Barcode on a label 70mm by 32mm. However, the printer is able to autosense the label size and the label layout is loaded from a text file. This allows us to offer different label formats without rewriting the program.
 

A large multinational company maintains a single log on domain within Europe over 30 sites linked by WAN technology. We were asked to develop a reporting tool for the local site administrators to:

• Display relevant group membership for access to departmental data, workgroup data, programs, web access and local drive access

• Detect redundant users

• Tidy up profiles, home directories and configuration files

• To administer printer assignment

• This highly successful project has been extended several times to add further capabilities to an already useful program.

We were contracted to provide a reporting system that analyses data stored in a PC Server running manufacturing equipment.

We wrote a program to query the server’s database, to decode the information stored in it and to analyse that data. Finally, the program produces a file of summarised data that can be further analysed with Office tools.

This program runs without human intervention and ensures that the analysis data is always up to date.

The implementation of a Windows NT server, using Terminal services to give a department access to departmental software without having to install the software on each of their machines.
In this case the department receives many catalogues on CD from many suppliers.

Rather than installing a CD drive and the catalogue software on each machine and holding a library of CDs, it was decided that it would be better to install the software once on the server PC. Each client machine is then able to access all of the catalogues using only a terminal program called the Citrix ICA Client. Administration is concentrated at the server and the user's PC is unaffected by any new installations.