Every manufacturing plant needs
to operate as efficiently as possible within the limits of its budget. In the past,
reaching this seemingly simple goal
was almost impossible for most manufacturing
sites because of the lack of integration between plant systems
and business systems. Plants were forced to fly blind, resulting in less-than-optimal
production output and inventory levels.
The reason for this discrepancy? Most plant information systems were designed to run a plant, and connectivity to any other system or application was an afterthought.
Until the last five to seven years,
few manufacturers even mentioned that they needed the automation layer, the manufacturing
execution system (MES) layer, and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) layer to
be able to talk to each other.
However, as the need grew to
share data among plants within a distributed manufacturing network, IT developers
cobbled together direct links between the different layers of applications.
This kind of point-to-point
integration made sense at the time, but it has resulted in a cobweb of hundreds,
even thousands, o brittle interfaces. The complexity of linking large and disperse landscapes has literally crippled the
health and flexibility of most manufacturing
IT architectures and hence business performance. Adapting those systems and applications
to communicate can take so long that entire generations of business opportuneties
can grow old while the IT department fiddles with the wiring.
Over time, more innovative industries, such as electronics, have solved the
same problem deviling IT by implementing standardized ways to assemble components
into a product, enabling parts to be replaced and extended – plug and play. This
process is now actually taking place in the IT industry. In this instance, software
called composite applications is built by assembling components that can be exchanged
and upgraded at will.
The underlying concept is enterprise
service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), which allows you to change and improve
your business processes without an expensive IT integration project. With enterprise
SOA, you can simply replace or add components to create new processes: the software
version of plug and play.
Enterprise SOA goes beyond the
fundamentals of a service oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a distributed software
model that uses independent Web services to support business processes, but the
enterprise SOA approach – as defined by SAP and its partners and customers – elevates
the design, composition, and management of Web services through the use of enterprise
services.
This white paper describes enterprise SOA and the business
opportunities it creates for manufacturers. To clarify this concept, we begin by
describing the parallel paths followed by software and electronics developers into
the new era of plug and play.