 |
 |
|
The bucks start here! The Bureau of Engraving and Printing
is the largest producer of security documents in the United States.
The BEP prints billions of Federal Reserve Notes for delivery
to the Federal Reserve System each year. These notes are produced
at the facilities in Washington, D.C. and Ft. Worth, Texas. The
Bureau designs, prints, and furnishes a large variety of security
products, including Federal Reserve notes, most U.S. postage stamps,
Treasury securities, identification cards, naturalization certificates,
and other special security documents. All products are designed
and manufactured with advanced counterfeit deterrence features
to ensure product integrity, and the Bureau advises other Federal
agencies on document security matters.
|
 |
|
The company was founded 1947, more than a half century ago, by
Mr. Gualtiero Giori. His countless inventions, which included
multicolor intaglio gravure and simultaneous perfecting, (waterless
offset blanket-to-blanket) soon gained him a reputation for quality
and performance among banknote and security printers worldwide.
In 1952 a collaborative agreement was signed between Koenig &
Bauer Würzburg/Germany and the Giori organization. This highly
successful alliance between the German press manufacturer and
Swiss banknote specialist, an alliance that endured almost half
a century, made sure that the Giori organization has consistently
been at the forefront of development in security printing.
Today KBA GIORI SA Lausanne/Switzerland is the provider for almost
all security printing presses worldwide. 90% of all banknotes
in the world are printed and finished on their printing presses.
But what has this to do with RTA ?
|
 |
|
Well. First it was The Bureau of Engraving and Printing
in 1989 as they specified for new security printing presses that
all occurancies on the presses has to be logged in a computer
system. And with all occurancies the BEP required all process
data like quality data - values, conditions and set-points
(historical time driven and real-time event driven), or quantity
data like all counters including life-time counters, or security
data (like login - logoff by users, different authorizations
to run the press), or performance monitoring data and last
but not least logbook data of all and everything what happens
on the press. Further that the system shall provide the Bureau
with the infrastructure necessary for interconnecting the press
control system to the Bureau's ORACLE database.
The system had to be redundant and the data should not
be just collected at one point and then appear sometime later
in the relational database. No - the data had to be in
the ORACLE database in real-time.
Pretty amazing these requirements at this time - looking ahead
way into the future. A milestone setup a decade ago, and everything
based on Industrial standards. And the Giori organization, which
has been always at the forefront of developments in security printing,
took the ball and started the development of a well-known product
today - called FLOWSYS.
|
The RTA configuration for FLOWSYS
FLOWSYS™ is the solution to all of these requirements. FLOWSYS™
integrates all that high tech equipment with the goal to
- Provide a uniform interface for press operators. Printers
can concentrate on the printing process again, no hassles for
the printer anymore to deal with different user interfaces or
even operating system functions using a variety of consoles.
- Provide a uniform data access interface for IT personal.
All available data is automatically collected in real-time from
all different pieces of equipment connected to FLOWSYS™. This
data is instantly transferred to a central ORACLE database where
it is stored in a standardized format, allowing IT personal
(if authorized) to access every bit of information.
- Provide historical and real-time production data. This allows
for instant quality control and accountability checking, eliminating
the need of conventional counting operations and increasing
liability of this critical information.
- Provide historical and real-time equipment data. Press conditions,
error messages, measurements (just to name a few) are very important
pieces of information when you want to improve the overall efficiency
of your equipment and keep production time up. This crucial
information is collected automatically from the presses in real-time,
providing a reliable source of information for production management.
And FLOWSYS™ is based on the RTA. No other tool could possibly
meet better the demands of clients that ask for state-of-the-art
software equipment in security printing environments. However
this requires that the presses provide certain functionality in
order to allow RTA to maintain the following features, which are
essential for our customers:
- Operating systems Windows (95 / 98 / NT / 2000) and Unix
(Solaris / Dec-Unix / AIX / Linux in the future)
- Database interface subsystem (Oracle 8 DB with SQL*Net and
ORACLE Pro*C Pre-compiler interface etc.)
- Data logging subsystem (historical time driven and real-time
event driven - RTA can handle 100.000 events / sec on standard
Intel based HW)
- Open architecture for interfacing to Management Information
Systems (TCP/IP, SQL*NET, ODBC, ActiveX, Intranet ready)
- Redundancy management - RTA based clients (e.g. press consoles)
can keep running without interruption and data loss even if
the connection to a server (e.g. line or section server) is
lost
And The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has been just
the first to require these high security standards - several other
National Banks followed by using FLOWSYS, or made a system like
this to a central part of their specifications for new security
presses. And that's how the RTA secures the money production worldwide.
|
|
|
