Let me start with a brief story. Pendant debuted Revolution Street WXS version 2.0 at ProMat 2022. One of my favorite modules is the sortation module in which sort lanes and sort criteria are configured. While at ProMat, I challenged visitors to our booth to do two things, without any input or advice from me:

Create and name a criterion by which to divert packages or totes to a specific sort lane. This includes specific barcode information, such as "contains", "starts with", "ends with", and "equals" among other criteria.
Apply that sort criterion to the appropriate sort lane.
Here's a snippet of the Sort Criteria section. After this the user drags this sort criteria to the sorter lanes that are shown on another part of the screen.

Recall, these were people that had never before encountered our software, and to whom I offered no hints. The bottom line is that just about everyone successfully completed the challenge within a minute or two. We want it to be that simple and that powerful.

We also want to support you and your team with quality, speed, and professionalism.

In the warehouse automation space, when we receive an order for a new project, it almost always comes to us from a mechanical systems integrator. But the end user is purchasing a system designed and executed by Pendant and the mechanical integrator. During the pre-sale part of the process, it is not unusual for us to be involved in the conversations with the end user, answering questions, offering suggestions, and mostly listening closely. One question that almost always comes up is about post Go Live support.

We always strive to build a system of controls and software that works the way you want. But there will be times when you and your team need support - and many times your team needs helpful resources at their fingertips to learn, to troubleshoot, to adapt to changes, and in general get your system to operate at peak efficiency.

In this post, we briefly introduce you to one of those valuable resources in the form of our updated software help site, which you can find here.

Let's dig in...

Available Sections

As you open the home page, you see the available resources.

API Section

Let's start by defining what an API is. According to the AI integrated with my Brave browser, an API, or Application Programming Interface, is a set of rules and protocols that enables different software applications to communicate with each other and exchange data or functionality. Pretty important, right? If our WXS is to help you operate your system efficiently and productively, it has to be able to communicate with your host WMS as well as potentially other systems like, for example, robots, VLMs, etc.

The API section of our site includes all the details of the API routes we use to allow our system and yours to communicate about things like orders, inventory, containers, notifications, sortation, etc. (see the side navigation menu on the left for what's included). It's rich with detail for those who have the need and the capability to understand it (see snippet below).

Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is a work in progress with articles currently covering the following topics:

Alarms & Events
App to PLC Communications
Container Data API
Electrical Installation
Global and System Control
KPI Graphs
Manual Motor/Actuator Control
Middleware & WXS to PLC Interface
Middleware Heartbeat
Sortation API

We'll be adding a lot more to it over time, and as we add new functionality to the WXS.

Videos

The videos section is also a work in progress to which we will add content continuously. For now, you'll find tutorial videos introducing you to the Revolution Street WXS, the Site Vision module, and our overall Support system.

User Guide

Finally, the user guides section has the comprehensive user manuals for both version 1.0 and version 2.0 of the Revolution Street WXS. These guides are packed with detail that both your software team and your users will find invaluable.

Summing It up

Everyone wants to know about support. To reiterate, we built our WXS Software to be highly intuitive. We want you and your team to be able to use the software without having to over-rely on support. It's not that we don't want to support you, but if you can get done what you need to get done without constantly having to get support, it's way more efficient for you and your return is higher.

To learn more, contact us here