BMH Chronos Richardson Case Study

Distributed Material Tracking System

Company Profile

BMH Chronos Richardson is market leader in bagging, weighing, dosing and batching technologies including plant control systems. Businesses served include the chemical, plastics, rubber, food and feed industries. Chronos Richardson operates from the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the USA, and also has a joint venture in India.

Business Requirements

The UK division of BMH Chronos Richardson, concerned with weighing, solids handling and process control, operate a process control system that takes in raw materials from a variety of sources and convert them into finished goods. The process involves creating semi-finished goods that can be stored and subsequently used in the final finished goods. The company had a requirement for a company-wide material tracking system whereby any source component can be tracked to the finished or semi-finished goods. Conversely, any manufactured item should be able to be broken down into its constituent parts. Several client applications and database server programs were required to interface between users, barcode devices and their systems infrastructure. BMH Chronos Richardson also required the system to be multilingual and display messages and labels in various languages.

Our Solution

Beacon were invited to design and develop the materials tracking system which should also be capable of displaying different language text. This project included the design of the hardware, drivers, database, reporting tools, communication devices and the user interface. The project was divided into four main phases: analysis, design and risk reduction; implementation, commissioning and acceptance; and re-work cycles following customer trials and feedback.

The whole application was about tracking the movement of materials around the company. Materials can be moved from one location to another either by Chronos staff using portable hand-held terminals with scanners, or automatically by machines. As a general rule the manual and automatic systems needed to be synchronised. They needed to share common descriptions of materials, mixtures and locations and each needed to inform the other when material was moved. This communication was achieved by TCP/IP transactions, the requirements of which were different for each factory set-up. To accommodate these differing requirements, Beacon ensured that all factory communication software was developed in separate replaceable modules.

The system we designed catered for all material tracking activities and processes, such as Material Reception (including handling of Goods Receipt Notes, input from barcode scanners, material identity with supplier’s information, container and weight details, storage and destination locations), Material Movement (including manual and automatic methods, movement from storage to stores operations, factory areas, and back to stores or to a waste location). We also developed a Finished Goods program to receive and process information from barcode scanners about goods to be shipped and customer details.