We have designed and support many systems for clients within the manufacturing and industrial sectors. Although at the core of these systems is usually a database system nearly all of them are integrated with other technologies and systems - barcode and RF tag readers, imaging scanners, web databases, email and ftp servers for example.
Systems range in scale from simple file share databases with a few thousand records up to interfacing with industrial systems like Citadel & Lookout from National Instruments and SQL server from Microsoft with 10s of thousands of data points added every day
Collecting the raw data is usually only half of the story. Nearly all of our systems are required to manipulate the data in some way. Data processing is either done within a client side 'front end' like Microsoft access or a web page , as a stand alone application running on a dedicated server or distributed across each client machine on a network. The amount of manipulation ranges from simple reporting through to complex planning, scheduling and data aggregating.
A number of our systems have no user-interface as such, rather they output data directly into other database systems using a variety of methods, output data to hardware systems using serial or network communications or transfer their data to remote locations for other systems to work on.