Bike maker tracks production with bar codes, Web-based software

Extending an Intranet to the Factory Floor

By David F. Carr

For Cannondale Corp., putting Web browsers on the factory floor was a way of minimizing the expense and complexity of the system it uses to track the manufacturing process.

Connecticut-based Cannondale is a leading maker of aluminum bicycles and bike accessories. The Web-based manufacturing system, created with Progress Software's WebSpeed, was deployed at Cannondale's Bedford, Pa., plant about 16 months ago. A subset of it is now in use at a subsidiary in Holland and will be extended to Japan and Australia over the next few months.

"The idea was really to reduce our hardware requirements on the floor," explained Bill Miller, the application engineer in charge of the project. Rather than using computers specially designed for a factory environment, he grabbed hold of hand-me-down 486 PCs, removed the keyboards, and set them up with Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator. When he ran out of 486s, he introduced low-end Pentium PCs.

As factory floors go, Cannondale's is probably not the most corrosive environment, Miller said. "There's some aluminum dust floating around and a lot of vibration and electrical noise.

At a Glance

Server: 200-MHz Compaq Proliant with 160 Mbytes of RAM, running Windows NT 4.0 Applications: Progress WebSpeed; Progress RDBMS (gateway to AS/400 manufacturing apps); four Progress client-server apps.

Clients: On Bedford, Pa., factory floor, 13 Windows 95 PCs, each with a 486 or low-end Pentium processor and 8 to 16 Mbytes of RAM. Web application also accessed by management and overseas subsidiaries.

Custom features: Bar-code readers replace keyboard and mouse on each client; JavaScript drives user interface in absence of mouse clicks.

We bought a few special cases with fans and filters. For the monitors, many times we'd just throw a piece of filter material over the vents.

"In over a year, I don't think we've replaced anything due to dust. The trick is, we could buy three regular computers by the time we bought one industrial computer," Miller said.

The factory floor application he created is atypical for the Web in that most users interact with it using a bar-code scanner rather than a mouse and keyboard. As workers finish a step in the assembly process, they swipe the scanner across a bar-code label on each bike. The bar-code scanner simulates keyboard input, and JavaScript routines perform actions that would be mouse-clicks in most other Web applications.

"If, for some reason, the UI [user interface] is not at the right input field, they just turn the computer off and turn it back on, and it comes right back up in Netscape," Miller said. "It's a little awkward, but it was worth it for the benefits I got out of it and the simplicity of the application." A browser interface also drives the application that managers use to monitor the manufacturing process. Progress client-server applications handle related functions that require heavier data entry.

Cannondale had selected Progress's client-server development environment several years ago, so it was a natural extension to use WebSpeed for Web application development. Progress is best known for providing technologies, including its own relational database, that other vendors embed in their software, but Miller said Cannondale selected the Progress tools on their own merits.

A five-simultaneous-user license of WebSpeed runs on a Windows NT server that also supports the Progress database and four client-server applications. The Progress database serves as a gateway to a manufacturing resource planning application running on an IBM AS/400.

Cannondale director of marketing and media relations Tom Armstrong said using Web technology ties in with the company's determination to move faster than the competition. "We have tried to do that by innovating not only on the product front but in every other aspect as well," he said. "A lot of our own production engineering is about getting inside the development cycle of our competitors." Web technology also makes it easier for Cannondale to extend the portion of the application that displays product specifications to Cannondale's overseas subsidiaries, Miller said, which receive partially assembled bike components and are responsible for final assembly, painting, and application of decals.

"All this information used to be placed in a binder, and when we made changes, how did we know they were updated in that binder? We'd have to send the drawings overseas," Miller said.

He added that distributing information via the Web is useful because it can include images of exactly how a fade from one paint color to another should look, for example. "It's so easy to do graphics. With a lot of other technologies, graphics programming can be quite complicated," Miller said.

Keywords: development intranet
Date: 19980921

Internet World
September 1998