Building on a flat file system to provide new operational benefits

A local furnace design/build firm needed to break away from the limitations of its existing flat file recipe system, in which each file was stored at the same directory level. That system had resulted in too many files to manage, it was difficult to keep track of versions of files as well as history, and there were security-related vulnerabilities.

The furnace company could see significant business benefits to updating its system and improving functionality. They worked with a team of professionals who are now part of Verus, to develop and implement a system that ensured ease-of-use, plant-floor accuracy and allowed for front-office analysis. We designed and built a system based on an SQL Server, using the existing recipe infrastructure and provided all the functionality our client wanted. The new system uses existing software so it is easy to keep updated: Rockwell ControlLogix, Wonderware InTouch, Wonderware Historian, and Microsoft SQL Server.