Exacta Success Story

A real-life example involved a customer who was performing an upgrade to their ERP system. The interface between the ERP and their WMS was expected to be unaffected requiring no changes to receive order information from the ERP. The upgrade was performed over a weekend, and everything appeared to go well. Shortly after the upgrade, Bastian Customer Support staff began receiving emails regarding bad order data in the system. This bad order data was a result of the ERP upgrade, which—unbeknownst to the customer and ERP—had a data formatting issues. Bastian Customer Support was able to inform the customer of this problem before the customer was even aware that there was a problem. In addition, the Support staff recommended and implemented a manual solution while the ERP was being corrected.

This real life example shows several ways Exacta's Event Director can help customers be proactive in system maintenance:

• A critical error outside of the Exacta system was identified by Event Director
• Key people (including Support Staff) received emails notifying them of the problem
• The problem was noticed immediately, preventing excessive downtime or missed orders
• A manual solution was implemented to keep the system running while the ERP data was corrected

Through Event Director, a service's properties and status can be viewed. This information includes connection information, processing configuration, and logging configuration. You can easily determine which services are running and which are not based on the color of the button (green or red). The last time the service was checked can be viewed along with statistics pertaining to the performance of the service. For example, to see details about importing Pick Orders, you simply click the green "ExactaPickImport" button. Event Director presents the details about importing Pick Orders, such as how many Pick Orders were imported and how many were rejected.

Event Director is like an automated supervisor—always keeping a close eye on the health of the system. However, this supervisor never takes breaks or sick days and always catches potential problems before they become critical.

If there is a problem with the hardware or one of the services, Event Director can send Alerts out to a configured group of people to inform them of the problems. The recipients of these alerts can be Supervisors, Managers, IT staff, or the Support Staff. The Alerts can be configured for each service and type of error to send emails or text messages.

Bastian is continuing to add new alerts and features to Event Director. One of the newer features available with Event Director is the ability to send out a daily or weekly email summarizing overall system performance. In the future we plan to add more monitoring of items such as conveyor up time and motor faults. We continue to focus on making the alerts more active and frequent without impacting responsiveness of the system.