I work for a manufacturer of medical devices in Basingstoke, UK. At the end of 2008 my employer went live with a major quality initiative. We were previously using paper documents to record the tests carried out on our devices during their manufacture, now we use a highly automated device history record.

We wanted to use the standard SAP AG quality Inspection Lot system to record the results instead of paper records. We configured the SAP system and implemented barcoding where possible but we had three areas where we couldn't avoid writing down a lot of numbers: electrical safety testing, instrument set-up and instrument configuration.

SAP will take date in a simple format, so I wrote three small Perl applications to talk with the instruments to upload/download data, and convert the XML data from the safety equipment into something simpler that SAP could understand.

We went live on budget, to specification and on time (itself an achievement). We can now find inspection data in SAP in seconds rather than possibly taking weeks to trawl through off-site paper records, which was the primary aim. A secondary benefit was that we improved line throughput by 15% - not bad at any time but under the current circumstances very handy.

Perl contributed significantly to the project. It was flexible - running on both Linux and Windows, it comes with CPAN - so existing modules were leveraged, it was rapid to develop with and is after all excellent at data munging!

After going live with the quality initiative in the factory, 'top brass' were invited round to inspect. To show SAP data in real time, the factory management team asked if it would be possible to have a large screen TV showing results in a pretty way during the visit. I was able to reuse an existing SAP/Perl web application server I built for another project, and was able to put live data onto a 'pretty' web-page in time for the visit.

I know and use Perl so my opinion is biased, but CPAN means that I don't have to reinvent wheels which means big savings of my time and my employer's money. Perl runs on various platforms and plays well with hardware and software, it doesn't have ego problems, it just gets the job done!