ACP actually started out in the early 90's as an integration company.
By 1998 our more than 30 employees worked out of two offices doing projects throughout the US and in Mexico. One of our biggest clients wanted to do an ambitious control system rollout that would involve over 100 PCs. Each PC would use locally installed HMI software to display data from its individual manufacturing 'cell'. As usual, all of this had to be installed with minimal production disruption.
The actual logistics of this task proved daunting. To make the hardware easier to maintain all of the PCs had to be purchased at the same time. This created difficulty just storing the equipment, and also meant that by the time they were all finally received and the project was underway they were already becoming obsolete.
The control and monitoring screens were another huge task. While the customer had helped with an initial design, once the first system was installed there were changes required. Then when the first two lines were running there were more changes. All of the changes required updates during the brief lulls in production. With the third line, more changes - and so on.
The environment was also very dusty, and this dust coupled with vibration would occasionally cause the PCs to fail. Fortunately there was identical hardware around for replacement, but these delays did not sit well with the customer.
And then another major issue - the HMI software needed to be updated. This meant testing, of course, but then removing, updating and reinstalling all of the lines that were currently running. Everyone was also dreading what would happen when support was no longer available for the now one year old version of Windows. As the system continued to grow it became more and more unmanageable.
Sometime during the course of this project one of our staff saw a Thin Client at a commercial computer show. He brought the concept back to our company and we immediately began investigating the technology, trying to discover if we could adapt it to this particular project. But the office ratings of the commercial Thin Clients and the limited management software available at the time kept it from being used with this customer.
The need for a better way to deploy computer interfaces on the plant floor was so clearly demonstrated during the course of this one particular project that we began to work on a solution that would allow us to bring Microsoft's Terminal Server technology to the factory floor. What we came up with was the first version of ThinManager. This product exactly met the concerns of manufacturing with such features as Thin Client failover and high-speed serial communication. By 1999 we had installed several systems and realized that we were on to something big.
And the rest, to use the cliché, is history!
For more information on ACP Industrial Thin Client computers, please visit our web site at http://www.thinmanager.com
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