Time adjustments from GMT

[Former Member]

I am new to xMII. By the end of February we hope to have an xMII server installed at our site, as well as the data center where our ERP system runs.

Question 1:

I have been pooling information regarding all of the different DataSources that we will need to pull information from when xMII is installed. One of the systems called TrackWise, uses GMT for all timestamps. Being that we are on the east coast of the US, the frontend of TrackWise will perform adjustments of 4 or 5 hours dependant on DST or EST when information is queried. Are there any existing functions within xMII that will be able to perform this conversion prior to executing queries? The TrackWise backend is Oracle 9i.

Question 2:

I don't fully understand why a server is to be installed at our datacenter. There will eventually be at least one other site running xMII, that will also need to pull data from the ERP system. Could you explain the advantages of this architecture?

Rod Hoffman

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Rod, welcome to xMII and this forum.

For the time zone questions, you may want to look for the topic of Virtual servers in the xMII Help Documentation. A virtual server has a "Timezone Offset" feature that might just solve what your issue. You could create a Data Connector to the Oracle DB and then a Virtual Connector that that DataConnector that would use the TimeZone offset.

As for the placement of the xMII server, it is common for "corporate" to want the server in the data center. It is recommended, in general, to place the xMII server as close to the data as possible, then as close to the client as possible. So if you are interacting mostly with ERP, and not the shop floor data, you might be ok. But, if you are looking to do more with shop floor data (and that data resides at the plants), you'll probably want to put the server there. Now, if you are using a UDS connector, you can install the UDS software on the shop floor server (recommended) and then the placement of the xMII server is not as critical. However, it is still a web server and clients may see some time lag if they have to go 1000s of miles to get to the web server.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the answer to the first question. I will look into the Virtual servers.

On the second question, we have been instructed to install xMII servers at the DataCenter <b>AND</b> at the Local Site (where shopfloor systems are located). Is this a standard configuration? Is there a connection between the two systems that is going to optimize the way data is pulled from both sources?

I see our usage favoring shop floor systems in the short term. Most of the users will be on-site, so serving web content from the local server will be preferrable. My concern is that we have not been given any direction as to how the 'Data Center' server is to be configured and I'm beginning to doubt its necessity. It seems that the reasons given were based on the future state, where multiple sites (with additional shop floor equipment) will access the same ERP system. Will this additional server funnel requests for information from the ERP system?

Thanks,

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Yes, the scenario you describe as being instructed to is probably the best approach. This will yield the best throughput of data between xMII servers and shop floor systems and ERP system.

To "talk" between the two xMII servers, you'll probably use the Virtual Connectors. The data center xMII server will have an actual connection to the ERP system. The xMII server at the plant will have a virtual connetion (VirtualXacute) to the data center ERP system. That way data between ERP and the data center xMII server has less distance to travel and the processing (Business Logic) can be done as close to the source as possible. With that said, depending on how much data and the frequency of the integration with ERP, you may be able to get acceptable response times calling ERP directly from the plant xMII server, but it probably is not recommended.

It does sound like these instructions were made with the "future-model" in mind.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Ryan,

Thank you very much for your assistance, that explains it perfectly.

Regards,

Rod Hoffman