Cone Drive Gears Up For Lights-Out With Robot/REPLAY

About 100 years ago, Samuel I. Cone, a civilian machinist and draftsman working at the Norfolk Navy Ship Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, patented a better mousetrap: double enveloping worm gearing. Double enveloping technology (first conceptualized by Leonardo DaVinci) puts more gear teeth in contact at mesh points than traditional methods. That means a larger contact area when the gears mesh, creating higher torque capacity and better precision.

Today, Cone Drive provides gear sets wherever there’s an industry need for high torque and high precision manufacturing—solar tracking, satellite tracking, machine tools, plastic sheeting, printing, medical instruments, and semiconductors to name a few. They are the global leader in durable, precise, double enveloping worm gearing.

Ed Kandel, a Senior Programmer Analyst at Cone Drive, has been with the company for almost 30 years, and is the main developer. His background in computers started in high school with a part-time job on a System/3 where he was the operator using punch cards! After operations, he got into engineering, because he “wanted to write programs and make things happen.” To do his job, he wears lots of hats, including security officer, applications administrator, and system analyst.

For computing power, Cone Drive uses a POWER6 platform running IBM i in three environments: test, development, and production. Their software includes the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package, Infor™ ERP XA; MC2, a collections system; F9, a financial application; and the Robot products they’ve used to automate their operations.

At one time they had an operator manually entering and running jobs in the system. Those days are long gone, because they’ve automated their job schedule with Robot/ SCHEDULE, the job scheduling and batch job management software. As Ed describes, “Our customers are industrial clients, material-handing companies, packaging companies, and so forth. You really don’t want manual operations—a system should be interactive and automated: updates, planning runs, financial closes.”

Ed likes automation. “Getting away from human intervention was wonderful—we don’t have an operator. Basically, we reload paper and change ink, that’s it. Automating the schedule was a good thing. And, instead of eliminating jobs, we’re doing other tasks. Our Six Sigma project really pushed automation. When we got fully certified, I think we had only 60–80% of our processes automated. With the Six Sigma project, we got the time commitment to go the rest of the way—it pushed us to go for lights-out.”

As Ed explains, they phased into the Robot products. “Robot/ALERT [system event notification software] really got us into Robot/SCHEDULE. We had a Material Requirements Planning (MRP) run that often sent messages about job conflicts. So we decided we needed Robot/ALERT and a more robust job scheduler than the IBM system scheduler. We started monitoring with Robot/ALERT, and then we added Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/REPLAY [interactive job management software].

“To get to lights-out with Infor ERP XA, we used Robot/ REPLAY. It made sense to use a product like Robot/ REPLAY because it captures screen images and allows you to manipulate the inputs and the field-level data to create job scripts easily.

“We’ve automated the MRP planning run. We use the Infor ERP XA calendar feature with a Robot/SCHEDULE reserved command variable I created to process the timing. I learned that you need reserve command variables with specific meanings. My big revelation came when I went to a Robot/SCHEDULE class—that’s when I realized that reserved command variables would really get us to where we needed to be.

ROBOT/REPLAY IS EASY TO TRAIN AND SHOWS UP READY AND EAGER TO WORK AT ALL HOURS AND ON HOLIDAYS. I APPRECIATE THAT IT’S ALWAYS THERE, THAT I CAN REALLY DEPEND ON IT!

“With Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/REPLAY, there’s so much flexibility. We’ve set up reactive jobs to IPL the system and bring it up in a controlled manner. For example, on Sunday morning we use Robot/SCHEDULE to bring down our system, put it into restricted state, do a full system backup, and restart it. First, we bring up basic services while we do our weekly housekeeping— environment things like removing deleted records—and then we make the system available to end users.”

They also use Robot/REPLAY to rebuild their test environment weekly. As Ed explains, “It’s invaluable to have an up-to-date test environment. Because of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), there are multiple levels of control and approval and we need to follow certain processes to develop and test the production environment.

“We have an online backup of the environment from the night before that we store on disk and there’s an Infor environment-rebuilding process that is green screen. So, we automated the process using Robot/REPLAY. Robot/REPLAY deletes our current test environment, signs on to our production environment, clones the production environment, and enters the appropriate commands and entries to rebuild the test environment from the disk backup, and runs it. Robot/REPLAY builds our environment, runs our Infor ERP XA processes using reserve command variables, and logs into the FTP server to perform some cleanup processes.”

Another thing that Ed likes is that, “Robot/SCHEDULE tracks everything. If anything fails, we’re alerted and the history is there—you see when the job ran and for how long. The auditors love that. Documentation is another big reason to automate. With Robot/SCHEDULE you can print your job schedules, show your history, and if you’ve got a problem, use the Good Morning Report. It’s great for SOX compliance to demonstrate that your processes are controlled and not variable. Now, we don’t get auditor comments like ‘Something doesn’t look quite right.’ nearly as often.”

To sum it up, Ed explains the reason he really likes Robot/ REPLAY. “Robot/REPLAY is easy to train and shows up ready and eager to work at all hours and on holidays. I appreciate that it’s always there, that I can really depend on it!”

By Bob Balderson