Progressive Scale Will be Highlited in the Next Rice Lake Magazine

Recently Joe Geisser, Northeast Regional Sales Director for Rice Lake Weighing Systems, organized a visit by Katy Madden , Editor for Rice Lake Magazine to view several installations by Progressive for the upcoming Rice Lake Magazine release. We don't want to spoil the article so we will just let you know a little bit here. They were taken to ITW highland a stamping company to see 4 920i counting scale systems in action. Each 920i is tied back to an AS-400 and a SQL server. The system handles labeling, automates filling by qty, inventory, and bar code scanning. Next, Rice Lake was taken to another client, Murray's Chicken. Rice Lake was immediately impressed with the depth of the integration that Progressive provided for Murray's. They viewed the Provision Processing System , an ERP system that tied the Rice Lake 920i in very nicely and tied into Quickbooks. Teh Provision Processing System includes Shipping, Order Entry, Inventory, Scales, Recall, Reporting and more. They also viewed an in-motion chicken sorting system, and a pre price labeling system that allows them to label items with pricing for customers. All provided by Progressive Scale Solutions, So be on teh look out for that article.

Progressive Scale Releases a Standard Network Version of its Popular UAS4000 Counting Scale Package

The UAS400 is a counting scale packaged software that Progressive Scale and Software Solutions developed for the Rice Lake 920i. This has been a very succesful package for Progressive and has just been taken to the next level. The UAS400 has always been a stand alone system. Tying it into a PC was always possible and done quite often, but it required customization. Recently Progressive released the UAS4000 Network 1.0. It still has all the same features that have made the UAS4000 great but because of the PC / Network Connectivity, it brings an endless array of possibilities. Designed to work with both SQL server or MS Access, the software allows the sysem to easily share data between scales, allows for ease of label design and changes, and allows each system to have and idependant configuration. Serial numbering is handled at the PC level so there is no chance of duplicates. Transactions (labels printed) are stored with date and time stamps for reporting and time tracking. Having a networked scale also breaks the logistics barriers of older serial ports. Clients can now monitor and control scales anywhere in the world. One Progressive client hase scales in Mexico, Texas, China, and Connecticut, all working from the same data. IT loves it because they can upkeep the scales even though they are on the other side of the world. Demos of the software will soon be made available at scaleprogrammers.com

Provision Processing System Gets a Facelift

The Provision Processing System by Progressive is rapidly becoming the system of choice for today's small to mid sized food processors. As a Meat packing software system, PPS is unmatched. With its low proce point and ease of use, meat processors all over the country are rapidly adopting this easy to use platform. Progressive keeps the cost down by not trying to re invent the wheel. Many competetive software's include an accounting suite. This drives the cost of the software way up and is diffucult to maintain. PPS uses the integration platform provided by Quickbooks. Quickbooks has teams of programmers making modifications every day for the latest tax laws etc... PPS takes advantage of that and integrates data with Quickbooks. Thats all there is to it.A copy of PPS and QB and you are ready to run a meat packing plant. Already a straight forward and simple software to use, Progressive is making it simpler by adding more graphical buttons and color reports. The next release is slated for Mid May. A video demo of the entire system will be available the first week of May at meatsystem.com

Making a System DSN for Access Using VB.net 2005

I just found a great article on making a system DSN for access using VB.net 2005. I looked everywhere and nothing else worked. I think they were all for VB6. Hope it all works out for you.

Great Scale Software

I am not sure what the ultimate scale software should look like but I bet it would look a lot like the new soft indicator software from Progressive Scale and Software Solutions. This software has it all. Multiple scales, up to 8 I think and real flexible bar code label printing and simple database integration. They have a downloadable demo and it gives you 60 try's before it goes out. It could use a little more documentation, but it all seemed to come together once I down and actually read the help files. http://www.scaleprogrammers.com/soft_indicator.htm.

And if you like winwedge, you'll LOVE this one.

Free Scale Calibration Software

Progressive Scale and Software Solutions this week launched a Beta version of its acclaimed X-Calibar Scale Calibration Software. There are now forums as well for technical support on all their products. The X-Calibar Software is completely free and will remain so. It is designed for laptops and the new small form factor PC's. This is a revolutionary software, I have seen it myself. Even if it doesn't work for everything, this scale calibration software is what the industry needed.

DO NOT BUY SONY VAIO LAPTOPS ESPECIALLY FROM BESTBUY

I recently purchased a sony Vaio VGN-SZ430N. Aside from the typical problems of getting windows vista off of there, I encountered another problem. The touchpad (mouse) occasionally works in reverse. Yes up is down, left is right. I searched this problem online and found many people with the same issue on different Vaio's. Not just this model. SO I went to Best Buy to bring it back seeing as I only had it 2 mos and also purchased the $400 anything happens warranty. That is bull by the way. I was told when I purchased it that if I do anything to this laptop bring it back and I will get a new one. Yeah if I send it back more than 3 times for the same problem at 3 weeks a pop. WHAT GOOD IS THAT? So my $400 was a prepay for shipping? There is no fix I told them, but the Clingon at Geek squad just did not get it. I guess I wasted my money. SO I called Sony. Answer... We acknowledge the problem but have no fix. We hope to have a solution soon this was 12/10/2007 for those of you with the same problem. The tech said give it a month or so. What a bill of goods I was sold. "This is the best laptop" "dude you crack the screen, drop it whatever, bring it in, we'll replace it" . Bull Crap. Best Buy and Sony you both lose my vote!!

Scale Calibration Software System Launch

Well all, it has been a while since our last post. Mostly due to lots of activity. I would first like to mention that we will be going live with a FREE scale calibration system. Yes, free. Just remember us when you need a custom scale or bar code system. It is a SQL based scale calibration system for scale companies. It has many features like repair tracking as well. It is meant for a PC and runs well on the new portable Vista units (about 7 - 8 in wide and about 5 in tall) I needed it so I wrote it over several months and figured some scale companies out there would like to have a copy. Please give me lots of feedback though so we can keep improving. If you need a copy let me know and I will ship you a CD. 203-792-2854

Features

Automatic calibration sticker printing
Weight serial number tracking
Maintenance tracking
Calibration procedures embedded in system
Unlimited scale calibration points
Peripheral Tests

Also our soft indicator just launched with a 30 run trial. Download a demo of our software based scale indicator

Metal Scrap Tracking System

With so much news of all this stolen copper and aluminum, I thought it handy to inform the metal scrap dealers of a metal scrap system our associates have produced. It has photo ID image capture, inventory control, pricing history and more. Follow the link above to see more information. Have a great day everyone.

Getting Listed Favorably On Google

When considering organic placement on search engines such as Google, many SEO companies tell you that the ONLY thing they do is to get all the right keywords into your site. That is just the first step. As a software engineer and an internet consultant, the message is clear. Its a popularity contest. Let's say you are Google and someone types in "Scale Systems" well I have 4,000,000 matches or keywords I have found. What is my tie breaker? Well how about unbiased votes for that site? Meaning, who links to that site without a reciprocal link back? Those are the votes I want, and how popular are those sites that are voting for it? (Google Page Rank). Although there are said to be hundreds of factors, link popularity is number one. Go ahead and prove it. Go to Google and type in "click here" who is number one? Is it Acrobat? If you go there is the word click here pasted everywhere? No. But everyone in the world votes for it as a link "click here" to download acrobat so you can view my PDF. That touches a little bit on the next bit of business. The really critical keyword is the text used as the link to your page. The "click here" became what that page was associated with.

So, how do you beat the system? Don't try. Especially joining some silly link farm or link strategy, those ultimately end up in failure. You may see short term results until the engine has you figured out and you get an unfavorable listing. What you need to do is be a cowboy with a white hat. Get out there and talk about your site on every blog, industry site, and bulletin board that has something to do with your site. Again please don't enlist some unknown company to do this for you unless you know they are not going to spam your site wherever they can until you have negative repercussions. If you need assistance let us know we will be glad to help.

Murray’s Chicken Plant Goes Hi-Tec

Long been the big name in free range poultry products, Murrays Chicken of Fallsburg , NY is growing fast. At an average of 45,000 birds a day, and a thriving live bird business, Murray’s could no longer live by its old paper system. They needed to automate. Dean Koplik, VP of Operations of Murrays Chicken called in Progressive Software Solutions to help. Progressive has been in the scale and software integration business for many years and had already been supporting Murray’s scale and label systems for years. Koplik knew of some of the systems that Progressive offered but was delighted to hear of the extent to which Progressive could help.
Progressive installed the Provision Processing System a meat processing software and hardware system(http://www.scaleprogrammers.com/meat_house_software.htm) built especially for meat processors. For Koplik, the benefits are numerous.

With the current climate in the meat processing world, first and foremost is the ease of lot tracking. All the scales in the Murray’s plant (up to 10 at any time) are programmed to automatically generate lot numbers along with their barcode labels. Scales are also tied into a SQL server over an ethernet network and tied to the SQL database for automatic data capture, product look up and inventory . The scale labels are later used in shipping for the shipping module. Thankfully, Murray’s has not had to do a recall yet, but they rest assured that at the touch of a button they can track lots to customers and dates within seconds.

Orders were once taken by hand, written down and walked back to production. At over 100 orders a day, Koplik’s shoes were getting worn out! Now Koplik and 4 others are taking orders over the phone. Orders can contain future ship date, notes about how to pack items, view on hand, how to deliver etc… After entering the orders on their networked desktop PCs, orders are immediately delivered to the warehouse using a networked document printer. The warehouse fulfills orders using the scale labels previously generated and a wireless barcode scanner. Koplik is saving a fortune in shoe repairs.

Shipping Tickets are produced as a result of boxes scanned. Tickets contain Skid numbers, case weights, order number, customer shipping information, and much more. What’s great for Koplik is that every shipping ticket goes into a Quickbooks cue for billing and is also removed from inventory. At the click of a button, all invoices are complete. This alone is the greatest time and money saver due to previous handwriting and accuracy issues. Perception is reality to Murray’s clients and having a hand written report with marker on boxes was keeping Murray’s from closing some major accounts. Now with the printed shipping reports and the UCC/EAN 128 bar coded labels, Murray’s sales staff feel confident they can fulfill the needs of the most demanding clients and has brought in some significant business.

Until now inventory was a visual process. Shrinkage became a problem as well. With the Provision Processing System, Murray’s has a “to the second”, handle on what is produced and what is getting shipped to who and most importantly what is not getting shipped.

Using the SQL reporting tool included with SQL server 2005, Brian Kessler (IT Manager) is able to create on screen reports, for all aspects of the business such as Inventory levels, production time studies, lot reporting, re-works and much more.

Murray’s is now using Progressive in many aspects of their business including custom printed labels and inserts as well as plant automation. Murray’ s continues to grow and Koplik maintains that he will bring Progressive and the Provision Processing System along with him.

Happy Easter Everyone! Aside from being pummeled with the easter bunny theme, this was a great Easter for me and I learned a lot this year about the significance of the holiday as I sat with my two boys at several masses this weekend. Anyway, I thought I would add a few things I accomplished this week. We were written up in meatnews.com for our meat processing software system. We will see what that brings. I also spent some time making a word wrap function for when I have to print a large ingredient field to an Eltron Label printer but need to split it up into several lines. The following code is in VB.net and breaks a string up into lines using a space as the defiining end line character. I can’t say its perfect but here you go anyway

Private Sub splitingredients(ByVal ingredients As String, ByVal port As Object, ByVal lines As Integer, ByVal cpl As Integer)
'this procedure takes the ingredients variable and makes it so many lines by so many characters(cpl)
'it also sends it out the port of choice
Dim length As Integer
Dim pointer As Integer = 1
Dim linepointer As Integer
Dim currentline As String
Dim currentcharacter As String
Dim linelength As Integer = lines
Dim linenumber As Integer
Dim backcount As Integer
Dim header As Integer

ingredients = "INGREDIENTS: " & ingredients
length = Len(ingredients)
While pointer <> length
currentcharacter = Mid(ingredients, pointer, 1)
currentline = currentline & currentcharacter

If linepointer = cpl And linenumber <= lines Then
header = Asc(currentcharacter)
Do While header <> 32


pointer -= 1
currentcharacter = Mid(ingredients, pointer, 1)
header = Asc(currentcharacter)
backcount += 1

Loop
currentline = Mid(currentline, 1, (Len(currentline) - backcount))

linenumber += 1
port.Write(currentline & vbCrLf)

linepointer = 0
currentline = ""
backcount = 0

End If
linepointer += 1
pointer += 1



End While
port.Write(currentline & vbCrLf)
linenumber += 1
If linenumber < lines Then
Dim tmpint As Integer
Dim i As Integer
tmpint = lines - linenumber
For i = 1 To tmpint
port.Write(" " & vbCrLf)
Next
End If

End Sub

Howdy everyone. Just wanted to touch base. We just recently brought 3 new programmers on board as a result of our great feedback from teh seafood show, and are cranking out some nice custom programs. But what I am most proud of is our poultry processing system for any meat packing plants. I now have it in 3 separate installations and have many quoted. My customers love it because it provides fast lot recall capability, scale integration, bar code shipping and labeling and best of all...Quickbooks Invoicing! Hey man I dont toot my own horn very often but this is a great system. My customers run their entire businesses on this system. I now have from 10 to 150 employee companies running this. Check it out if you want. meat and poultry processing systems and software Look for our article coming up in your favorite poultry magazine

High Speed Food Grading

As you may or may not know, we have done a lot of scale systems and barcode systems in the past at scaleprogrammers.com and countless Rice Lake 920i systems. Well,recently Rice Lake asked us to develop a high speed Lobster and food grading system for the Boston International Seafood show. It was a challenge to get the scale to weigh accurately as fast as someone could throw a lobster on the scale. Using series of timers and averages, we were able to accomplish just that as well as add a few bells and whistles such as data reporting and PC networking. If you are in the area March 11,12,and 14th, 2007 come and see us at the Rice Lake Booth. I will be the guy with the toy lobsters in his hand.

FB3000 vs 920i vs Combics Pro

Who comes out on top in my opinion is the Sartorius Combics Pro. Why? well though I love the 920i and the FB3000 for what they are, the Sartorius Combics Pro is the best mix of both systems. Here's the deal, the 920i is a great batching system with a great track record. I have put those scales through all kinds of torture. It does lack however in its out of the box communications and lack of a file system to facilitate simple data transfer. All data must be run through a serial port, even the ethernet card is converting to serial. Although I still sell many of them , it is becoming dated. The FB3000 is a great unit, but due to a lack of external commands, if you plan on writing programs, you end up communicating to the scale via a streamed serial string and rewriting the whole scale app anyway . It is a Windows XP machine however which gives you great flexibility and all kinds of connectivity, once your app is complete. This streaming serial communications method however dampens its chances of becoming a good batching system. Now enter the Combics Pro. This unit has both. It is a truly programmable scale with a full file system and a true ethernet connection. Get this , I can browse to the scale and control it and view the screen as if I was in front of it. Very nice and well thought out. Anyway thank you for stopping by and checking out our blog. If you ever need any scale system or bar code system support check us out. Till next time -John Russo

Fairbanks FB3000

Well everyone, I turned on the Fairbanks FB3000 today. I have never been a real big Fairbanks fan. This is a huge leap for a company that in the past has had to me seemingly out of date equipment ideas. So far it it very nice. It is however a little easy to hack or better said, screw around with using standard windows key commands, but I have not really got into it yet. It's a nice enclosure with everything you could need to communicate right out of the box. The touch screen is very responsive. It comes with a slick little mini keyboard, though I think the majority of my clients would be better served with a full size keyboard. I think in most industrial environments, a larger keyboard is better. What would be cool is to set this up with a wireless mouse and keyboard. Anyway I will be getting into it further tonight, but so far for Fairbanks I am impressed
John Russo , Senior Engineer Weight Scale Systems

Fairbanks FB-3000 and Sartorius Combics Pro

Alright everyone, I am excited because I just got my first job with the new Fairbanks FB3000 windows based scale indicator.  If is a fully programmable touch screen windows XP machine.  I do not have it yet but my client is sending it this week.  Ladies and gentlemen if this thing works it will be NICE.  I also have some interest in the new Sartorius Combics Pro programmable indicator as it has some very nice features as well.  I sat in on a demo of this indicator and was impressed. How does this all compare to the Rice Lake 920i? Well, the 920i is a great instrument but it is quickly becoming dated as it has limited memory, 3^rd party Ethernet networking, no file structure and needs some overall updating.  The Pro to the 920i is its age. It is proven and I have put that thing into all kinds of harsh environments, and done just about anything you can think of with it and will continue to.  Don’t count it out by any means.  I will let you all know how I make out with the new stuff as I am sure it will be buggy and take some teeth pulling to get going.

John Russo – The worlds greatest scale blogger and Weight scale systems man.

Scale Calibration Procedures

Alright guys…what you have all been waiting for

Scale Calibration Procedures

Yes we found a  post of many scale calibration procedures for you!!  If you have some you would like to share then post some. This was done by the creators of X-Calibar the original calibration system that was ruthlessly copied by other manufacturers, and they still didn’t get it right.  X-Calibar scale calibration system goes WAY beyond!! That is at calibrationreports.com  If you need a demo they will walk you through step by step online and their model is by scales in the system so there is really very little start up costs unlike the 8-10 thousand dollars plus ongoing licensing with the other guys

 

Over Engineering

I am so tired of running into clients who could have spent half the money for a system just as effective as the one they purchased. The reason for the over spending is typically over engineering. I am currently working with a client that hired a scale manufacturer to build them a custom batching system. It is a very basic automated fill application, but it has some problems and I am being called in to rescue. Well here’s what I am getting at. This system has WAY too much “What If” factor built in. To index 2 boxes on a conveyor the control panes has 14, 3 position control buttons and all to fill 1 box because they could not get the slow fill (2^nd scale) to work. You have got to be kidding me! I understand that these are really smart guys developing these systems and so am I , but you do not have to prove your batching and design prowess on a simple scale batching system at the clients expense.

-John Russo scaleprogrammers.com

Quickbooks Integration Problem

Well everyone I just wasted a week. I had good working code for a quickbooks custom interface but thought I did not and spent a week trying to fix something not broken. Here’s what happened, The company I made the interface for used 2 quickbooks datafiles. To my dismay they added the products I was invoicing to only one of the quickbooks companies, therefore I was trying to invoice something that wasn’t there on the second data file. I got no errors but no invoice either. I finally decided to look at the items and found the items I was invoicing did not exist in this company file. If you ever need some quickbooks interface sample VB.net code follwo that link. I went through hell to get this to work and maybe I can make someones life a little better. Maybe throw me a link on your site to http://www.scaleprogrammers.com/ because I just saved you HOURS of work alpha geek peter vogel watch out!

My Scale System Does Not Work

Scale dealers often call me in the same situation. They hired a scale manufacturer to do their scale programs yet they are not delivering or they are too hard to deal with, and here’s the kicker..I could actually help these people if I could get the original source code. Most of the programmers however will not release that and the client is left to start over from scratch. The key is, next time you sign up with a programming house, find out if you will have access to the source code or not. If not please choose carefully as you can get really stuck if they do not deliver.
John Russo http://www.scale.net

The First Scale Systems Blog

As a very interested party in the scale and bar codes sytems field, we thought it would be important to have a blog about scale companies, scale systems and the like. Well here it is. As the owners of scaleprogrammers.com and http://www.scale.net , we thought it important to create a forum for those who are just starting up in the scale or bar code business or those seasoned veterans who just need a place to vent or rave about the newest countng scale or bar code scanner. I have been in the business for over 14 years and have seen many changes in technology and the scale and bar code business. Many scale and bar code businesses are faced today with the ever growing need for system support. I will try through this blog to do just that. If you have any techy computer questions, I would love to answer them here. My company has expertice in vb.net, 920i programming, rs-232 communications, label printing, bar code labeling and standards, printers, calibrations and much more. Please contact us through our site scaleprogrammers.com and we will do our best to post the answers here.