CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2012
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Plex Systems is a cloud-based service provider, which offers manufacturing information technology systems to clients in a number of different industries.

A challenge for any cloud-based service is ensuring the ease of customizability of business processes to end users. One such challenge comes from creating additional customized formats for shipping labels.

Currently, the creation of a new format for a shipping label is a manual multi-step process. A customer must first lay out the desired design on paper, measure where element locations are to be placed, and provide detailed textual information describing the label to Plex. Subsequently, Plex must manually enter this information into the customer database, after which that label becomes available for use by the customer.

To simplify this process, our HTML5-Based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Label Designer allows customers to create and format labels directly in a web application. These labels are saved into the customer database in the appropriate format for immediate use. Our software eliminates the hand work and enables customers to have direct control over which labels are available to them without required intervention by Plex.

Our HTML5-Based WYSIWYG Label Designer is built using HTML5 and JavaScript, and designed to run in common web browsers. Label layouts are stored in a SQL database using SQL Server 2008 and retrieved using JSON and ASP.NET.