When General Motors decided to electrify their entire product line it was ambitious. It meant reducing product design-to-manufacturing times by a factor of two or three from previous programs. It meant doing business with more partners, doing business in different ways. It meant teaming up with local suppliers like KUKA, HITACHI, HTI Cybernetics, and Spen-Tech Machine. And they needed a new way to simulate the the presence of a GM Plant while still assembling systems in their own Build Shops. GM asked MicroCODE if we could produce an App to do that... and we did, in three (3) months!
Part of the issue with testing Assembly Plant systems at a Build Shop is that the Supplier does not have a connection to a 'real' GM production environment. Plants do not want outside connections that are doing simulations and testing while they are building customer vehicles. Enter MicroCODE's Control App, where the supplier's engineers can generate their own orders on-the-fly from easily configured 'Profiles'. We often heard during training: "This can really generate Vehicle Orders without a GEPICS connection?" - Why yes it can, when you're in Control.NET℠.
This application must run on engineer laptops, disconnected from the Internet, connected only to a local area network with the equipment being tested. This necessitated a stand-alone, self-contained Windows app that did not require a Server. You're in Control.NET™℠.
