OEM Printer Manufacturer
How OPT Fit the Bill:
An OEM printer manufacturer makes many models of printers for the packaging industry. A variety of sizes and shapes which might be used in manufacturing plants all around the world, serving an equally varied and demanding possibility of packaging situations.
By design the printers are very adaptable to each situation and to aid the operators, HMI products are used on each printer which allow for recipe development and deployment. The ability to choose a recipe for each product ensures the product will be processed correctly and helps to eliminate the possibility for operator error when setting up the job.
Background Info:
Each printer presents unique challenges for an HMI as the components used on the printer may be of various manufacturers and communications schemes. Whatever HMI is used must be able to communicate with the particular equipment specified for the printer. OPT HMI products are a good fit as they come with a wide variety of drivers and include a very useful ASCII driver which allows for adaptation to many drive controllers.
Another capability of the OPT HMI products which was very useful to this OEM is the ability to create one project and have it re-sized automatically for any size HMI. Because the variety of sizes and shapes of the printers is so large, the variety of HMI products is also quite large. So being able to create one project for an HMI and re-size it for any size HMI allows for a minimum of development time and a maximum of deployment opportunities.
The Solutions:
By using PM Designer software to create the projects, a single project can be designed and used in any size HMI. With very little change to a project, drivers for various controls and drives can also incorporated. Multiple language support allows the projects to be launched on machines that will be used in any country in the world with full language support for that country's spoken language. But what really brought the sales to this OEM home for OPT was the ability to launch any project on a Windows PC.
Panel Express allows you to use a PM Designer project on a PC and in the case of this OEM, some printers have a Panel PC incoporated due to the complexity of the printing process. Before Panel Express, the machine had a PC and an HMI. Now, with Panel Express running on the PC, the external HMI can be eliminated and incorporated into the PC, saving the OEM time and money and the ability to pass this savings along to the customer.
An elegant design for a minimal cost.
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