Software Solutions

Can-Technologies provides complete software solutions from initial design to final implementation to meet the needs of the users, the maintainers, and the purchasers. Software design takes many factors into account including: how to best solve the business problem, user experience needs, IT architecture standards, system extensibility, and many more. Designing software for the manufacturing plant floor environment poses unique challenges itself. Manufacturing system software must interact with a variety of other systems with many different programming levels, from common high-level programming interfaces to low-level hardware protocols. All applications, despite these differences in platforms, purpose, or age, must be seamlessly integrated with in a way that is often completely invisible to the plant floor.

Many of the software systems we develop have the need for robust data storage which typically takes the form of a relational database. We have extensive experience modelling industrial plant floor, and other business systems in relational databases as well as the programming and execution in major database providers such as Oracle, SQL Server and others. Data integrity and system performance are key factors in the proper design of an application database. Without taking the proper consideration for data integrity, you can easily lose that which is one of your businesses most valuable resources - information. Similarly if the data can not be put in or read back out fast enough, your database will become a bottleneck which will constrain the throughput of your information system.

Architecture Considerations

Can-Technologies can provide architectural designs that range from simple executable applications to completely distributed multi-component solutions. The current trend in Information Systems makes extensive use of Web Services to support the Service Oriented Architecture model. SOA is quickly becoming the goal as well as the standard for the most successful business organizations. SOA provides a framework for loosely coupled components, which due to the vendor agnostic nature of Web Services based on XML technology, are platform independent. Once implemented, the SOA framework becomes a very agile system which can quickly adapt to the ever changing needs of the business enterprise.

MES Systems

Manufacturing Execution Systems take a variety of forms, ranging from off the shelf products to completely custom solutions to meet any specific needs. MES systems are highly data-centric which means that they are typically centred around a database of some kind - relational or sometimes proprietary. Off the shelf MES modules, while specific to their task (quality, performance, maintenance, etc), are generic in that they need to attempt to satisfy the requirements of every plant. This often means that implementing an off the shelf MES system requires a creative thinking process in order to fit the package into the framework of the customer's Information Systems infrastructure.

When dealing with custom-built MES systems, a balance must be struck between developing a relatively generic tool that the customer can use in a flexible manner, and developing rapidly with a cost-effective approach in mind.

Web Solutions

Current software design trends make use of the thin web client wherever possible. This alleviates the need to distribute heavy 'executable' applications to all the PC workstations, which subsequently would need to be maintained individually. Also because web applications make use of a platform independent communication protocol, this allows for a wider choice of client platforms from PC to hand-held which makes web-based clients vastly superior to that of heavy clients.

Technologies

Can-Technologies is skilled in a wide array of Information Systems technologies including the following:

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