Headquartered in Texas, US, 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. Total organic carbon (TOC) analyzers represent a three-equipment product line for analyzing varied aqueous and solid samples.

To stay one-up in a fiercely competitive landscape, the customer needed to ensure the breadth, depth and continued contemporaneity of its TOC analyzer line. The customer sought to trim software R&D spend. Partnering with right-fit global embedded services providers, such as Mindteck, was one step toward rationalizing R&D spend. Redesigning the TOC software formed part of this choreographed strategy, and the customer looked to our team to perform this redesign. The objective was to have a common high level architecture and implementation platform straddling product lines resulting in scale economies. Furthermore, the team was tasked with generating a reusable software resource pool, significantly trimming turnaround times and development risks. The value accruals from this exercise were significant: improved time-to-benefit, iterative development approach and incremental release strategy, and R&D support from good talent pools, apart from cost competitiveness.

The Solution

Our dedicated team redesigned the TOC software so that it could be invoked directly from a Windows CE v3.0-ready, single board computer with LCD touch screen mounted on the TOC. Optionally, it could run on desktop PCs connected to the sample concentrator over Windows XP/NT/2000 based LAN. The business logic upholding configuration, operation and monitoring was implemented as COM object colonies. Each colony was identified dependent on the functional cohesion between objects.

The PC application used MSVC++ v6.0 language system (with ADSMAXALL v3.0 for ARM SDK board support) , and the ADS board based Windows CE application, EVC v3.0 language system. Local data was stored within serialized flat files. MS Access 2000 was used to store data on PC, maneuver data and generate offline reports. The Reporter used IO Comp graphing and charting components for offline graphic data presentation. Crystal Report v9.2 displayed and printed reports.

Apart from cost arbitrage, the customer’s TOC line benefited from our reusable software that:

	Configured the sample concentrator and stored data
	Regulated the operations via the TOC’s core and state machine, which in turn used Modbus/USB interface to peek-and-poke a programmable interrupt controller
	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 thereof locally into an XML based file system and, further, into a centralized MS Access database
	Generated reports from data stored offline
	Additionally, imported/exported data from/to external databanks such as laboratory instrument management systems