Category: App Story

Mobile Thin Client Computing Made Easy

Tom Jordan Leave a comment

ThinManager Mobile for iOS is an iPhone or iPad app that can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store. It allows you to connect to your ThinManager and manage it from your iPhone or iPad. You can shadow clients, change their configuration, restart, or disable them from the palm of your hand.

To use the ThinManager Mobile iOS app, simply visit the ThinManager Mobile page to download the Proxy Server.  After downloading, click the .exe file and the Proxy Server will install itself on your ThinManager Server and function as a service that will allow your mobile devices to talk to the SQL database. [...]

Real Security Is About Prevention Not Recovery

Tom Jordan

Over the last few months, we have been hearing more and more about the Stuxnet Worm.  Originating in 2007, it became a topic of conversation in the main stream media after its global deployment in 2010.  At the time, Symantec reported that less than 2% of all known Stuxnet infections were on machines in the United States.  Now, almost two years later, it is once again front and center for both its relationship to the newly discovered Flame malware, and recent surge in infecting new networks and machines. [...]

Juicing Up HMI Performance With ACP ThinManager

Tom Jordan

Polytron, Inc. jumped in to help a major juice processor and bottler resolve hardware and software issues with approximately 100 Human Machine Interface (HMI) terminals at their facility.  The bottler found that maintenance and replacement of failed computers, required software updates, and the multitude of applications, resulted in production downtime and overall inefficiencies.

Hardware and software complicates life on the plant floor – Environmental conditions on the plant floor and the heat generated by each individual computer caused the HMI computers to fail frequently, compromising the manufacturing plant where system uptime is critical. When an HMI computer hardware failure occurred, plant maintenance personnel would spend hours setting up another computer to replace the one that failed. [...]

Chevron North America Exploration & Production using ThinManager to power production

Tom Jordan

pdfdownload

Since 1879, Chevron has been on the cutting edge of exploration and innovation. Over the years they have grown and changed with the times and have always continued to evolve along with the needs of the world. Today, they are not only one of the largest companies in the world; they are a global leader in technology. When Chevron needed a new technology for plant management, they chose ThinManager.

Time to Upgrade

For years, Chevron had used custom built remote units for their facilities to work within custom parameters specific to their industry regulations. After years of dealing with the added resource cost in cash and labor, a project manager made the suggestion to switch to thin clients as a hardware solution at a specific plant. The suggestion was met with approval and they began the task of searching for a thin client management platform that could meet their needs. [...]

ThinManagability

Tom Jordan

pdfdownload

If you’ve ever traveled through Baltimore you know that it is a heavily industrialized area. Out near the water you can see countless cranes and other industrial equipment moving large amounts of raw material, metals and scrap. It feels like the kind of town where a system integrator would feel right at home.

It is near this industrial area that Datability, a division of Kruse Controls, makes its home and its where we met up with Doug Coulter to discuss his experiences using our ThinManager thin client management solution. [...]

Old School for New Technology

Tom Jordan

Jordan Engineering Builds a ThinManager Thin Client Solution “One Brick at a Time” for Canadian Precious Metals Company

There just aren’t many companies that run their businesses on old school principles. Regular face time with customers, doing a job right the first time, and giving back to the people around them to name a few. Jordan Engineering does all this and more. Giving indeed seems to be the secret ingredient for this integration company’s success.

CEO and founder, Sandra Murre has always worked hard to build success. Sandra and Jordan engineering share that success with their employees, their customers and the world around them. The profits from the business get split into thirds; one third is returned to the employees through profit-sharing, one third goes back into the business to improve customer service, fund growth and business performance and yet another third goes to charity. [...]

Upgrading a Glass Coating Plant

Tom Jordan

Several years ago, a glass manufacturer was building a new glass coating facility. They wanted to use all the latest technology, especially for the control and monitoring system. It was decided that one of the new MS-Windows based HMI packages, Wonderware, would be used.

The operator interface screens (HMI or Human Machine Interface) were used to monitor every aspect of the coating operation. A particular challenge in this application is that the customer wanted almost all of the points needed for process monitoring displayed at the same time. This resulted in a main display consisting of tiled InTouch screens showing about 1500 points. These screens are displayed almost all of the time

The control system consisted of 3 industrial computers in the main control room and 2 on the manufacturing floor. Each computer ran Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 and WonderWare’s Intouch HMI package. Two large PLCs were responsible for controlling the manufacturing process – one PLC for each of the manufacturing floor PCs – with Ethernet communications between the PC and the PLC. All required data was then distributed to the other PCs via NetDDE. The system performed very well, but over the time many limitations were discovered. The following is a list of the major issues: [...]

Critical Water Operations: Moving Forward with a New Setup

Tom Jordan

pdfdownload

One of Ireland’s Largest Pharmaceutical Companies Deploys New Thin Client Infrastructure

When it came time to replace old PCs that had been used to manage the critical water operations at one of Ireland’s largest pharmaceutical companies, they called on SolutionsPT and Control & Information Management Ltd (CIM) in Dublin to recommend a new path forward. The customer needed to replace the system they were using to control the clean water input and the wastewater output for all of their facility’s processes. Both were GMP systems, critical to the site’s operation, providing water to the multiple buildings located at the site. [...]