Our intergation tests went well and I'm satisfied with all the work
we've done. It was pretty stressful, but we're able to meet the
deadline. It's on our PMs now to do a good job by finding new
customers. I'm sure they'll do the best.
And what it this thing about? It's a product called MFM (Material Flow
Management) . It consists from 3 parts, Client - Middleware - SAP.
1. Client (= mobile client) uses mobile terminals (Windows CE, Pocket
PC) to collect and process data. Data can be from production,
warehouse, shipping department etc. They can be collected throught bar
codes or by manual entry. We plan to include RFID support in nearly
future.
2. Middleware is set of services, handling data from mobile clients and transfering them into SAP.
3.
SAP is an enterprise system, where all company processes can be planned and all data are processed.
I'm in a team that is developing SW for mobile clients. It's very (for me
the most!) interesting part of the product. There were many "tough
questions" and many hard decisions were made. Fow example, we had to create and
implement online / offline scenarios. When there is no signal (=online
connectivity - GPRS, WLAN etc.) for mobile device available, it must be
able to cache all the data and transfer them to middleware after it's
online again. We had to care about various devices our customers can
use. Mobile client can run on devices from
HP (e.g. iPAQ etc.) and
Symbol
(e.g. PDT 8100, PPT 8800, MC 9000 etc.). All these devices have slight
different implementation, keyboard and operating system / platform. And there is also
little difference between Pocket PC platform and pure Windows CE
devices :-).
We are developing in C# (Visual Studio .NET 2003) + Compact
.NET Framework. SQL Server CE is used to store data on devices and
Remote Data Access + Microsoft IIS are used to transfer data to and from desktop
SQL Server. Because data are tranfered through network, we must also
consider security in our scenarios.
This first release is only beginning. There is a lot of work to be
done, but I'm sure it is and it will be a great product. I'm happy to
be a part of this.
Here are some pics from mobile client:
Logon screen
Material acceptance - user is entering order number
Items included in order
Material re-storing from store 0001 to 0002