September 22, 1999 Web posted at: 11:17 a.m. EDT (1517 GMT) by Ellen Messmer

From...

(IDG) -- On the typical high-tech factory floor, a combination of human workers and automated machine tools are busy turning out complex equipment for buyers in the network, medical and other industries.

But keeping track of exactly what's going on has largely been done through paper-based tracking of units built on the shop floor, making it difficult to check the order status or push through order changes at the last minute on customized equipment.

To address this problem, start-up Datasweep last week unveiled a Web application called Advantage that keeps track of factory activity in real time and gives buyers, resellers, parts suppliers and the manufacturer a view of it all via any Java-based browser.

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"As manufactured units become customized, and manufacturing time needs to be closely synchronized with shipping time, equipment buyers want to know whether change orders can be taken in time," says Datasweep founder Vladimir Preysman, a systems engineer whose background includes stints in manufacturing at KLA-Tencor, Hewlett-Packard and Kodak.

Datasweep's software runs on a Windows NT server. The software collects production information from factory floor computers via agent programs and taps into back-end enterprise resource planning systems that hold customer order information. Datasweep's software synthesizes all the information and makes it available to end users with Web browsers.

Datasweep based its software on NT partly because Microsoft is making inroads into the factory floor with its network operating system, Preysman says. Advantage uses the Distributed Common Object Model and ActiveX Controls to communicate with factory-floor applications.

Advantage also uses the Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 database to store production information, with support for Oracle8 anticipated in future releases. Advantage ships with a second online transaction processing database that takes production information, analyzes it and readies reports that include the history of each unit and other data.

A handful of manufacturers are already using Advantage, including Flextronics, Harmonic, Intuitive Surgical and Acma Computers. Acma President Allen Lee says Web-based factory-floor production tracking, in use at his company since March, has helped boost on-time delivery of the computer systems Acma assembles.

Acma plans to give a number of its largest customers a Web-based view of production status in the near future in order to reduce the number of service calls that Acma sales staffers typically handle regarding factory production.

Although the Advantage application doesn't yet let users input order changes directly into automated machine tools, that is a feature Datasweep plans to work on for the future.

A typical configuration will cost about $80,000, the company says.