“For customers who have an MES control system for managing and monitoring work-in-process on a factory floor, we can provide customers with the development software tools they need so that they can extract whatever machine information they want into their MES system,” said Mark Clemons, Business Unit Manager – Printers. “Customers who want their printers to talk to their MES Systems now have a way to get this functionality without lots of custom development. The development path can be quick since it is outside of our code.” Clemons adds that there are multiple ways for customers to implement the system; they can develop it on their own, use a 3rd party developer, or Speedline can provide resources to assist in development.
“Leveraging our new open architecture for communication, we can now create custom applications that we call ‘OpenApps’ for customers to do things with machine information that they simply could not do before,” he says. “Customers can create their own apps; develop concepts of features that can be shared, and expand the development of new ideas and concepts for the printing process. In fact, Benchmark 4.0 includes several new OpenApps to help demonstrate the concept.” Benchmark 4.0 uses the Windows 7 operating system, whose benefits include faster processing speed and better performance using 64 bit technology, less memory usage, and faster network speeds.
