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To: Zebra 365 who wrote (11304)	2/17/1998 7:26:00 AM
From: Richard S. Schoenstadt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 31646

Zebra, it was an earlier post of yours that got me thinking about this issue with respect to bringing factory floor info. up into business systems. I guess what has me perplexed is that I think it is already common to use factory floor info, of the type given in your example, in higher level systems - Capt. Jacks post to the contrary notwithstanding. The example you give, which is a good one, is for work done 3 or 4 years ago. So this has been clearly going on for some time. The Keystone example is also a good example but I don't know when that work was done. Also it strikes me that Tpro has repeatedly said we are a mostly services business. We do some software yet that is not our main business. But wouldn't this effort to bring factory floor info higher up be mostly a software related effort. (It also looks like a network issue based on additional research.) For example look at the description of Wonderware's Factory Suite 2000. You will find it at wonderware.com This is software. And isn't one main function of this software the packaging of factory floor info in a way that allows it to be easily used by various manufacturing and business analysis programs. Here is just a snippet. >>>>"FactorySuite 2000 is the most important software introduction in the history of industrial automation," said Roy Slavin, Wonderware president and CEO. "It allows plant engineers and management to solve literally any plant floor application problem and with the unprecedented integration of its application modules in a single powerful real-time relational database, all production data collected on the plant floor is now instantly available to corporate computing applications such as manufacturing or enterprise resource planning (MRP/ERP), scheduling and financial applications."<<<<<<< Isn't this what Tpro is talking about? I suspect if Wonderware is doing this so are all of their competitors. This idea of using factory floor info. in higher level systems strikes me as being self evident. Like I said above I suspect it has been done for a long time. I think Wonderware's niche is based on the increasing power of the PC and a move to NT as the operating system of choice and a move to open systems. Even if there is an opportunity here which there may well be, imo Tpro will not be leading the charge (i.e. for the most part they will not be writing the software) and they will be competing with every other systems integration company for the si business. So far Tpro has not made money doing that. RS