Our customer came to us with an idea:  They have a process that they’ve been honing for years, but they found that a critical metric for maximizing production while minimizing energy consumption of their aluminum smelting pot is to be able to calculate liquid chemistry composition on a scheduled and repeatable basis.  Their R&D team designed an algorithm that would allow them to theoretically complete a single pot test in a few minutes, a procedure that from sampling to results calculation used to take the customer 48 hours to complete.

TelePro has been tightly integrated from the product’s inception in the lab to in-person production trials out in the field.  As usage of the application has grown to over a dozen locations around the world, so too has the customization of the product, and TelePro has played both a support and new development role across all implementations.  It supports multiple languages and compatibility for a wide range of system configurations.  The user interface is designed to be simple like a metering tool and provide guidance through error handling.  The application utilizes ZigBee (802.15.4) and Wi-Fi (802.11g) protocols for wireless communications.

Since 2011, the application has now been modified into a commercially licensed product.  Originally developed in-house written fully in VB.NET, the application needed reorganization to support being a globally distributed product maintainable by third parties.  These changes involved separating the proprietary algorithms from the user interface, and so it was converted to an isolated DLL written in C++.   This allows for future modifications to the front-end of the application in a separate codebase from the back-end data processing portions.  Licensing technologies such as SecuTech USB dongles were implemented to restrict usage for controlled distribution.  The application employs custom file encryption and source code obfuscations to further protect the product.

The team at TelePro shares a high level of familiarity with the application to provide fast support and intricate advancements, and often doing rapid releases of bug fixes and new features to all sites.