iTAC MES Suite is a European MES platform focused on traceability and quality management with customers in the US, Europe, and Asia. Customers who use iTAC tend to deploy L2L CloudDISPATCH to provide an integrated maintenance workflow and process solution to complement iTAC's machine connectivity and traceability and quality management functionality. Our easy to integrate API capabilities allow customers to leverage their existing iTAC investment to automatically populate data in the CloudDISPATCH production module. Additionally, iTAC data can be used to launch Dispatch events in CloudDISPATCH for a wide variety of workflow and processes from Code Red maintenance events, cycle-based Preventative Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance activities, and more. CloudDISPATCH is a great enterprise addition to iTAC in cases where iTAC is not fully deployed across a site or multiple sites due to costs or other factors. In this case, CloudDISPATCH can "harmonize" the shop floor metrics and end-user experience where various MES/SCADA platforms exist.
Below is a list of general use cases for integration with MES/SCADA systems like iTAC. This information contains the general workflow and best practices we have discovered working with our customers.
General Use Cases:
- Machine abnormalities that trigger Dispatch events and workflows.
- Predictive Maintenance based on Machine data
- Machine Cycle Counts for launching Preventative Maintenance (PM) dispatches
- Recording Line Level Production and Scrap Counts
Supported Versions Details:
We support all recent versions of iTAC.
Integration Methods and Best Practices:
General Considerations
When it comes to iTAC, L2L CloudDISPATCH integration API endpoints and use cases are well known and documented. Depending on your specific use cases and how you are storing data in the iTAC data historian, you will likely need to customize how your integration works. We've seen iTAC implementations turn into ground warfare with heavy integration work on a machine by machine basis. Based on this experience we've streamlined our API endpoints to target only the most critical data to achieve the results our solution can deliver. For this reason, our integrations tend to be far easier and faster than your typically iTAC implementation. This targeted data first approach means up to 1000x fewer data mappings and transfer requirements to CloudDISPATCH than you may expect. As a result, we don't become your "data historian" in the cloud. We become the shop floor management platform that drives improvement. A big distinction, with a faster ROI and a simpler implementation.
iTAC Connectivity Options
iTAC provides a REST API interface with the backend database is Oracle Standard Edition which provides the way to get access to this data through the use of an ODBC connection from a custom integration or from a middleware product.
Middleware Solutions
Depending on your established company's integration standards, you might develop this integration using an existing middleware solution by pulling data from a SQL database using a middleware SQL connector or through a REST API connector. We have customers that have successfully completed this using some of the following middleware solutions:
https://help.boomi.com/bundle/connectors/page/r-atm-Database_connector.html
https://docs.mulesoft.com/db-connector/1.8/
https://success.jitterbit.com/display/DOC/Database
L2L API Code Examples
You might be asking yourself, I'm technical, can't I just do this myself? YES! Based on how easy it is to use our API, a lot of customers jump right in and write custom iTAC integrations using the tools, programming languages, and platforms they are most comfortable with. If this is you, we've created a number of API code examples in all of the most popular programming languages. Check out our Github repository at:
https://github.com/leading2lean
Use an L2L Partner
We have a number of Machine Integration partners with experience. Please contact support if you would like an introduction.