Throughout this period, the problem of developing new drivers for hardware was becoming a drain on our technical team with often limited returns - a company would approach us, wanting to use our software but requiring connection to hardware we had not seen or dealt with before. This was becoming a problem for other companies as well. Windows was now well developed and the addition of new facilities (OLE) replacing the rather shaky and slow DDE enabled a new industrial standard to be developed, know as OPC (OLE for Production Control, now known as Open Platform Communications). Through this period and later, we developed facilities to enable us to use OPC as a means of avoiding driver development as hardware companies started to make OPC drivers available for their hardware.
1996 and we released SCAN1000 Version 4 with a large number of new additions.
1997
- Procedures. The software base was now so large that it became increasingly difficult to know if changes and additions produced problems. We recognised the need to standardise our testing systems and produce robust test and documentation. This became a fulltime job for one of our engineers.
- Rapiscan. We developed a training system for Rapiscan who produced scanners used in airport (and other) security. This was unusual for us as it did not involve our data acquisition software but did make use of the Novell network skills we had acquired installing power station systems.
1998 We started to combine original Saturn code with ScanGX to give it a graphical interface. Also to be added were OPC, a 32 bit version of the SCAN1000 Script system, comprehensive spreadsheet and chart libraries. A major exhibition in Houston was used to announce the product. This, when eventually finished, formed the basis of our mainline product for the years ahead.
1998 - 1999 We produced a small boiler monitoring and control system (CIBER) in conjunction with another company which included SCAN1000, a touch sensitive panel mounted PC and modular I/O. This was used on a number of boiler installations. CIBER was in fact a specific configuration of a general design, Plant-IT which was designed as a platform from which specialised systems could be built:
This was developed further to produce the Production Auditor, a system aimed more at management than engineering. It offered Total Production Managment (TPM) and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) data from inputs taken directly from production lines. Initially using Plant-IT hardwacre and software, the design expanded to include faster programmable I/O in the form of a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and additional computing power in an inbuilt server with database support.