Our customer engages in design, production, marketing and servicing of analytical instruments for ascertaining, analyzing and measuring chemical presence in various compounds. The customer serves a client base spanning such sectors as food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, homeland security, industrial process control, petrochemicals, power and semiconductor.

The customer’s purge-and-trap sample concentrator processes samples before they are passed through gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers to estimate volatile organic compound (VOC) presence. Our customer sought to rationalize software R&D spend. Decoupling software R&D efforts and mapping these to an optimal partner, namely Mindteck, was one step toward this goal. The payoffs from this exercise were significant: reduced time-to-market, iterative development approach and incremental release strategy, and R&D support from good talent pools, apart from cost competitiveness. More importantly, the customer needed to ensure the breadth and continued contemporaneity of its purge-and-trap product line. Furthermore, the customer looked to our team to generate a reusable software resource pool, significantly trimming turnaround times and development risks.

The Solution

Acting, in effect, as the extended software development arm of the customer, our team developed software for configuring, operating and monitoring the purge-and-trap sample concentrator. Its common high level architecture and implementation platform transcended the customer’s product lines translating into scale economies. The business logic underpinning configuration, operation and monitoring was implemented as COM object colonies. Each colony was identified dependent on the functional cohesion between its objects. It could be invoked directly from a Windows CE v3.0 ready single board computer with LCD touch screen mounted on the purge-and-trap sample concentrator. Alternatively, it could run on desktop PCs connected to the sample concentrator over Windows NT/2000 based LAN. The PC based installation carried an additional feature – formatted reporting of logged data. A security and audit trail system regulated every operation.

Apart from cost arbitrage, the customer's purge and trap sample concentrator benefited from our reusable software that:

	Configured the sample concentrator and stored data
	Provided a host of diagnostic functions for regulating and monitoring the sample concentrator and peripherals
	Set up a range of parametric data for the sample concentrator, sampler and GC operations
	Logged all functions performed and the results locally into an XML based file system and, further, into a centralized MS Access database
	Generated reports from data stored offline