Automated Data Collection (ADC) Overview

Today’s information technology environments may be as varied as the businesses they serve. When information technology is extended to the production floor, an open, flexible, multi-platform ADC development platform is needed to satisfy the maximize the productivity – regardless of the industry or markets served.

Radley’s X/DC development and integration platform is just such a platform, designed to meet today’s business requirements, using leading edge technologies to support evolving industry standards and computing architectures.

The X/DC business objective is to automate and consolidate business processes to achieve Business Process Improvement.  The processing power of 21st century business systems in available only by entering more and more transaction data.  Manual data entry strains normal operations, and limits or even inhibits productivity.  Radley Corporation designed the X/DC platform to automate many types of data collection processes, in order to release the power of the business system, while lightening the load on an organization’s daily operations.  Specifically, X/DC improves business processes by:

• Reducing the number of scans required to perform a transaction

• Making the process more efficient

• Streamlining and/or automating data collection activities

• Validating transaction data & updating the business system in real-time

• Consolidating multiple business processes

X/DC accomplishes this “without customizing the business application”.

Having developed its’ first Data Collection System in 1992, Radley Corporation’s many years of experience resulted in the design of X/DC.  Deployed in a client-server configuration, X/DC provides a host of capabilities not available within a terminal emulation configuration, all while maintaining the many benefits of an on-line system. At the core of X/DC’s design is the ability to receive data from any input source (data collection device, software application and/or database) and route that data to any output destination (software application and/or database). X/DC can not only automate the execution of standard business system transactions; it can also link and automates the interactions between multiple business applications used in varying combinations within today’s ever more complex manufacturing environments.

X/DC’s data routing capability includes support for multiple input sources, as well as multiple output destinations. Transaction data can be collected from combinations of scales, PLCs, data collection devices & terminals, or software applications & business systems, and routed to one or multiple destination systems - in order to automate the execution of one or multiple business transactions.

X/DC messages are stored generically and may be formatted for exchange in any number if industry standard variations, to share data as the source(s) and destination(s) may support.In this way, X/DC history files may be maintained and accessed via a common set of X/DC reports and utilities. This generic data storage also maximizes the re-use of X/DC application programs, allowing implementation personnel to focus on transaction functionality rather than the underlying technology framework.

X/DC is an XML-based, table driven, message routing system. Windows-based and utilizing industry standard .NET framework, X/DC is also an ADC development and deployment platform designed to be more then just an integration/middleware application. X/DC includes additional application modules developed to perform common business functions.