The simple act of integrating or sharing plant data with the enterprise does not produce more efficient operations. Nor does it automatically improve business decisions. But, the integration between an enterprise system and a plant system can sometimes solve a specific problem.
At ARUP Laboratories Inc., in Salt Lake City, warehouse employees had difficulty locating and retrieving specimen samples. The lab receives 25,000 specimens per day from hospitals. The lab performs 2,500 tests that hospitals can’t perform. ARUP stores the specimens for a minimum of two weeks—some much longer—because further tests are often required. This means ARUP keeps up to 500,000 specimens in frost-free deep freeze.
In past years, ARUP sent bundled-up employees into the two-story freezer 1,000 times per day to find specimens. The process was both expensive and inefficient. In 2002, ARUP moved to an automated system that sends a custom-made robot into the freezer after the specimens. The specimen tubes are bar-coded so the robot can read them. The company’s custom-programmed enterprise resource management system keeps track of all the specimens received from hospitals – this is tied into the company financials for billing purposes.
The warehouse is run on Warehouse Rx WCS (WRx), a warehouse management system built by the Columbus, Ohio-based Daifuku America Corp. The system was built to run the Motoman robot that retrieves the specimen tubes. But the trick to make the system work was the ability to get the enterprise system to talk to the warehouse system. “The information about the specimen is in our enterprise software system,” explains Charles Hawker, director of automation at ARUP. “The WRx knows the position of the tray that holds the specimen, but it doesn’t know the identity of the tray.”
When the specimen is taken to the warehouse, the enterprise system knows what tray the test tube is on and it knows the position on the 30-test-tube tray where the specimen sits. But the enterprise system doesn’t know where the tray is. So in order for the automated process to work, the warehouse system and the enterprise system have to accurately exchange data about 1,000 times each day.
“Both systems are keeping track of the sample,” says Hawker. The communication among the three software systems produces a very efficient retrieval process. “We can get one tube out of 500,000 in two or three minutes,” says Hawker. “That beats the old system where an employee had to put on a parka and hunt for the right sample.”
See the story that goes with this sidebar: Which Way should Data Flow?
