IEN: How can companies maintain legacy equipment with advanced control technology, in the spirit of the lean enterprise?

Runkel: Network enabling legacy serial equipment is an ideal way to both streamline industrial systems and to provide the real-time plant and production information that is vital to successful supply chain management. Serial Device Servers that permit standard RS-232/422/485 manufacturing equipment such as CNC machines to be accessed via Ethernet are the key to this approach.

Serial Device Servers are used to create "virtual COM ports" on any PC, enabling an entire production process to be remotely monitored and controlled via a single workstation. The Serial Device Servers themselves can be accessed from a standard web browser on any computer, permitting any number of administrative functions such as inventory control, maintenance, and productivity analysis to be remotely implemented across any number of facilities located any distance apart. (Illustrated: Using Quatech ThinQSerial Device Servers to network-enable legacy serial equipment, such as CNC machines on a production line, is an ideal way to remotely monitor and control an entire process via a single workstation.)

The main advantage of this approach is that it significantly upgrades the production process, decreases manpower needs and maintenance costs, and utilizes the facilities' often pre-existing Ethernet backbone, thereby contributing to an overall "leaner" enterprise, while leveraging the substantial investment in legacy production equipment and proprietary software applications.

Traditionally, there have been two major obstacles to network enabling industrial systems using Serial Device Servers -- slow data processing that causes network latency problems, and complex, time-consuming installations. Quatech's newly released ThinQ line of Serial Device Servers was designed to overcome both these problems. With an unprecedented 80 MIPS (millions of instruction per second) of processing power, ThinQ can hold its own on even the busiest networks. And with Quatech's innovative Installation Wizard, even novice users can get ThinQ up and running quickly and easily (typically in under 10 minutes), without taking up valuable IT staff time.