ERYMA – TECHNICAL LINK
Rule engine for preventive maintenance
The core of the system is a rule engine capable of analyzing ATM operating traces and generating maintenance tasks before breakdowns occur.
Total project duration: 8 months
The total cost of the project was 300 man-days.
Details of the project :
Problematic
After years of optimizing their curative maintenance processes and their organization, Eryma has managed to cap the availability rate of their Vending machine fleets at 97%. As the probability of optimization to exceed this threshold seemed very low, Eryma decided to differentiate itself from its competitors by innovating on the notion of preventive maintenance.
Solymatic’s aim was to try to improve this rate through preventive maintenance actions, which would eventually prevent the shutdown of certain ATMs and thus improve the overall availability rate of the fleet.
Other additional advantages were brought by preventive operation:
- Optimization through planning of human resources management,
- Optimization of SPARE (spare parts) by programming the necessary availability.
Mission statement
Organization
For the realization of the project, 5 persons have been allocated :
- 1 project manager and functional manager
- 1 architect and technical manager
- 3 development engineers
This contract was executed entirely with Tana Corp resources dedicated to the project.
Main characteristics of the client
Eryma Services (formerly Solymatic) is a high value-added services company for the banking sector based in the Lyon conurbation. It is one of the main players in the fields of electronic banking, IT services and banking maintenance.
With its 5 regional branches and 41 technical centres, it maintains more than 15,000 banking distributors throughout France and provides financial management services to more than 1,000.
Conduct of the project
Advice and support role provided throughout the project
- A real force of accompaniment: The organization of the project gives a primordial importance to the quality of the accompaniment, to make the customer benefit from the expertise and the know-how capitalized by Tana Corp on its projects of the same type.
- Consulting strength : Our solid experience on management applications in the field of distribution and fixed-price projects has enabled us to provide the customer with the best market practices in this field. Moreover, Tana Corp is a force of proposal in the highlighting of functional options likely to bring a strong functional added value.
- Expertise on web applications: Interfaces for managing and exploiting results have been realized in the form of web applications to facilitate collaboration and access to information. We used our expertise in this field to create ergonomic and easy-to-use screens to maximize the productivity of technicians using these applications.
Proposed methodology to validate the project steps from a client’s point of view
Proposed project reporting
A monthly steering committee enabled us to steer this long-term project in close collaboration with the client.
Tools chosen for the project management
Project Management: MS Project
Incident follow-up : BugX (based on Mantis, http://www.mantisbt.org/)
Version and configuration tracking: SubVersion (http://subversion.tigris.org/)
Solution features
Business processes covered by the solution
- Rule engine configuration and execution
- Generation of alerts and multi-level maintenance missions
- Processing of technical logs of PLCs in several formats
What were the most difficult features to implement?
The large number of manufacturers in the field of banking distributors and the lack of standards on this market means that each manufacturer’s automatons generate technical logs under a different protocol. One of the challenges of the system to be developed was to be able to interpret several different protocols at the same time and to be able to add new protocols on the fly. For this purpose, a translation engine for each protocol in a unique format was developed, as well as a protocol editor allowing a non-computer specialist to modify or define a new protocol.
Technical platform elements
Software package, software or development languages used
After analysis of all the constraints, Tana Corp proposed the realization of a custom application, based entirely on a Microsoft solution:
- Microsoft .Net Framework, C# language
- ASP.NET with AJAX
- SQL Server 2005 Express
- IIS 6 Web Server
Reasons for the choice
- Microsoft .Net Framework with C#: development platform allowing an excellent cost/delivery time/quality implementation ratio.
- ASP.NET and AJAX: scripting languages allowing the development of WEB interfaces with a high level of ergonomics.
- SQLServer 2005Express: free, high-performance database server, perfectly adapted to the target data volume.
- IIS 6 Web Server: Microsoft’s web server for hosting ASP applications
Share of pre-existing developments used on which the Supplier has capitalised to complete the project
- Libraries of AJAX interface elements already developed internally by Tana Corp
Challenges and key success factors
- Ergonomics: daily use of the application in a production context,
- Scalability: allowing a significant increase in processing capacity, without the need to modify developed applications
- Technical complexity: several applications in the whole system (such as the Rules Engine or the Protocol Editor) have a high degree of complexity, which is why emphasis has been placed on their analysis and design phase.
Business result
Today, the tool has received excellent feedback from users, who have appreciated it:
- the scalability of the application, which is able to handle a large number of PLCs and protocols…
- the ease of use and ergonomics of the user interfaces
