WIPtracker Technology History

The Smart Operations Management (SmartOpsMgt™) company, the WIPtracker^™ operations tracking and management system, for make-to-order manufacturers, and the SmartOps24x7^™ real-time intelligent-agent based enterprise integration software platform,  are the result of a long history of technological evolution, with Dr. Peter Green as technical director and systems architect.

This project started with the venture-backed development of an early AI based supercomputer, which led to the funding of a project at MIT by DARPA to develop distributed real-time AI methods, based on using a network to computers to acoustically track airborne vehicles in a noisy battlefield environment.

This was followed by the development of the Activation Framework real-time intelligent-agent based-software platform at WPI, which was funded by the US Air Force research lab and NASA. Here the primary focus was on the simulation of air-battles and developing real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to give real-time advice to pilots operating in a hostile and rapidly changing environment.

The Real-Time Intelligent Systems (RTIS) corporation was spun out of WPI and for a decade acted as a defense contractor supporting a variety of US defense department initiatives, primarily in the area the application of Activation Framework.

With a major downturn in defense spending, around Y2K (year 2000)  RTIS was renamed BellHawk Systems Corporation (BSC) and changed its focus to industrial applications of intelligent agent and real-time AI technology.

This software used many of the lessons learned from the Activation Framework project and was successfully installed by BSC to solve operations management problems in a wide variety of industrial organizations for nearly a decade, until the financial crisis of 2008, when development was taken over by Milramco LLC.

Milramco was founded by Dr. Peter Green to start a project named Tau Adaptor to develop a new version of the intelligent agent software, based on using a network of Windows based computers connected over the internet, with a focus on using web-browser and web-server interfaces.

The outcome of this project was a new intelligent-agent based software platform named MilramX^™ and an AI based operations tracking and data capture software named BellHawk^®.

Under license from Milramco, BellHawk and MilramX are sold today, throughout the continental USA by KnarrTek Inc., which is a systems integrator with a primary emphasis on selling industrial data collection and smart operations management systems to mid-sized industrial enterprises. In this role, KnarrTek acts primarily a systems integrator providing complete turnkey data collection systems, with software, services, equipment and supplies. As a result, KnarrTek has a significant number of happy customers using BellHawk and MilramX.

Smart Operations Management LLC (SmartOps™) was recently founded to offer an integrated version of BellHawk and MilramX, named WIPtracker^™ to be sold as an affordable standard plug-and-play operations tracking and management product, preloaded in a small ruggedized Windows IOT computer, with a specific emphasis on the needs of the over 200,000 small and mid-sized make-to order manufacturing plants in the USA.

WIPtracker is intended to support data collection and operations tracking at a single site, such as a manufacturing plant, industrial distribution warehouse, or construction site and supports data exchange with a wide-variety of accounting, ERP, CRM and CAD systems. WIPtracker also integrates a special version of MilramX which can be used to automate much of the "intelligent grunt work" typically needed to manage a busy  make-to-order manufacturing operation.

For those organizations that need to integrate operations at multiple geographically separated sites, SmartOpsMgt also offers a special version of MilramX, named SmartOps24x7™ which can be used to provide an integrated near-real-time view of operations across multiple sites,  automatically route the flow of customer orders to multiple plants and warehouses, enable enterprise-wide management of supply-chain management (to minimize the impact of tariffs) as well as to integrate real-time operations tracking and management at multiple sites with a central ERP system and CRM system.

Both WIPtracker and SmartOps24x7 make extensive use of a variety of AI technologies to enable these systems to be tailored by external systems integrators as well as an organization's own IT and manufacturing engineering groups to meet the specific requirements of each organization, be they a tier 2 or tier 3 supplier or a tier 1 organization with many plants and warehouses in different countries.

 SmartOps welcomes licensing inquiries from solution integrators and large organizations with their own IT and manufacturing engineering departments.