MILLBURY, Mass., Dec. 8, 2011 — BellHawk Systems announces the availability of an improved product labeling module for its BellHawk® Cloud-based web-mobile Manufacturing Execution System
One of the major issues with moving Manufacturing Execution Systems to the Cloud is how to efficiently print out barcode labels on barcode printers in local manufacturing plants from a remote server, which is running the MES system, over the Internet. With the release of BellHawk V6.2 this problem has been solved.
BellHawk uses BarTender® Automation from Seagull Scientific for label layout and to provide the print drivers for a wide variety of barcode printers. This is installed on a Windows 7 Professional computer in each plant and can serve a number of barcode printers.
How remote printing works in BellHawk is as follows:
1. A material handler with a mobile computer uses a web-browser to enter data about incoming material, or material from production, or material being shipped to a customer, into the Cloud-based MES application over the Internet. The user then selects a button on the web-browser screen to request labels for the materials being received, produced or shipped.
2. A web-services (SOAP/XML) request is sent from the server to a BellHawk application running on the Windows 7 Pro computer in the remote plant over the Internet. This Win 7 machine then retrieves the print request and the name of the label format from the Cloud server MES database using web-services requests.
3. The BellHawk remote application then retrieves the label format from the local database. It looks up named fields in the label format and retrieves the values from the MES system on the Cloud server using web-services requests. It then populates the values in the label format and calls the BarTender SDK to print out a single label or a sequence of labels.
4. The labels are then automatically printed out on a wireless mobile printer on the belt of the user or on a nearby desk-top printer.
While this mechanism is complex, it requires no intervention from the user as all the data is automatically pulled from the database on the Cloud-based server running the MES system. It also allows users in each plant to lay out their own label formats and control which printers are used, while using a centralized Cloud-based MES system.
For more information, please see http://www.BellHawk.com, or contact Peter Green, President of BellHawk Systems, at Email or call 1-508-865-8070 extension 301.
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