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"Enter SAP Manufacturing: powerful software that integrates
manufacturing with the rest of your
enterprise – and the only comprehensive solution for managing manufacturing operations. "
Source :SAP
A Manufacturing Imperative: Enterprise SOA
is also known as :
Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture,
Service-oriented Architecture,
Enterprise SOA Platform,
Enterprise SOA,
Enterprise SOA Adoption,
Understanding Enterprise SOA,
Enterprise SOA Strategies,
SOA Practices,
Enterprise SOA Environment,
Solutions Enterprise SOA,
Offers Enterprise SOA,
Enterprise SOA Governance,
SOA Solutions,
Embracing SOA Solution,
On-demand Enterprise SOA,
Imperative Enterprise SOA,
Enterprise SOA Services,
Enterprise SOA Web,
Enterprise SOA Features,
Assess Enterprise SOA,
Enterprise SOA Strategy,
Success Enterprise SOA,
Enterprise SOA Progress,
Enterprise SOA IT,
Enterprise SOA Presentation,
Secure Enterprise SOA.
Executive Summary
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, of
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 opportunities 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.
Enterprise SOA: The “Home Theater System ” of Information Technology
Why is an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise
SOA) critical to manufacturing today? It’s all about the flexibility
and adaptability that enterprise SOA gives you to integrate the
factory floor with enterprise applications and to make needed
changes to your processes without the enormous cost and time
of creating new interfaces.
The home theater system and its evolution provide a striking
analogy to information technology’s trek to enterprise SOA and
the required technology platform. Consider what you can do
with today’s home theater system. You are blessed with very
sophisticated, yet easy-to-use techniques to connect your TV,
music system, DVD player, iPod, and other components to
your home theater. You do not need to know in detail how
they work, nor do you need to call technicians at all these
vendors to install them. In fact you probably would be upset if
such technical support was needed. Today all system components
support a set of standard input and output connection
points and corresponding adapters. Through the Internet or
your vendor, you can obtain a manual of each component,
which lists the supported adapters and how to connect all
these systems (see Figure 1.)
Figure 1: An Enterprise SOA Analogy: Home Theater System
As shown in Figure 1, you can go though the manual provided
by the vendor of the home theater system and easily connect
other equipment without knowing how each component is
designed. What matters here is the clear connection point and
type of the adapter, no matter which vendor provides the adapter.
All your audio and video components, regardless of their differences,
appear as an integrated unit. Using the remote control,
you can switch between components, for instance, from the
DVD player to the VCR, to use the whole unit in a different
way.
Enterprise SOA is your home theater system for software. It
provides standardized adapters – enterprise services – to link
your software components and enable you to switch from component
to component. A central enterprise services repository
contains all the information needed to assemble a software
application and has the ability to execute. Like the home theater
manual, this repository describes all software objects available,
the definition of the basic components holding those software
objects, the services offered and implemented by those components,
and a process description on how to use and assemble
these services into a software application.
]
Far more than a manual, however, the enterprise services
repository provides extensive functionality, managing the service
interfaces and coordinating the process flow. The result
is the composition, meaning the plug-and-play assembly of
components, which appears as an integrated software application
unit – even though the components work differently
internally and are provided by different vendors. You can easily
switch between components in order to create a new software
application supporting a different business process. This
is done by replacing the “plug” from one underlying component
to another one, based on the information available in
the enterprise services repository.
Innovation and Standardization Become Teammates
Enterprise SOA and composition bring together innovation and
standardization as teammates rather than opponents. This is
critical today, because the fiercely competitive and changing
environment in most industries, particularly manufacturing,
is demanding that you be highly adaptive and able to change
your business models and processes quickly. Global visibility
and workflow across all internal operations and beyond are also
mandated – an achievement that requires extensive integration
and use of industry and enterprise-wide standards.
We have emphasized that by using enterprise SOA composition
rather than static software application units, you have the ability
to innovate quickly by reassembling and adding components
to support the new business process you need. And you can
achieve this without wreaking havoc on the IT infrastructure
and your IT budget.
Enterprise SOA also enables you to layer standards on top of
enterprise services or even build standards into the service itself.
You can also extend these standards to services from different
enterprise repositories, while still maintaining the main
paradigm of a plug-and-play assembly of applications.
Among key industry standards enabling enterprise SOA are
the ISA-95 standard for integrating manufacturing control
and enterprise systems (developed by the Instrumentation,
Systems, and Automation Society, which is accredited as
a standardization body by the American National Standards
Institute), Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX) and
Petroleum Industry Data Exchange (PIDX) eBusiness standards,
and RosettaNet standards for business process interoperability
across the global supply chain.
A core value of enterprise SOA is that it helps you overcome
a long history of business and IT problems. Standardization,
while offering significant cost benefits, has been anathema to
change. This is because in many of its forms – which range from
simple software interfaces and the use of standardized applications
to outsourcing of an entire process – it has virtually cast
processes in concrete.
Why? The technology issues are legion. The IT industry began
with native application programming interfaces (APIs) to
connect one application to another (analogous to the printed
circuit boards of the electronics industry, each of which came
with its own set of proprietary connection points or adapters).
APIs required deep expertise in the individual functions and
resulted in the scattered landscapes that are still very common
in today’s manufacturing world.
The next phase was the development of vendor-specific
standards, which allowed other applications to be connected,
but still required technical expertise to integrate systems. In
most cases, a “leading” application dictated how all other components
had to be integrated. The shortcomings of vendor
standards left major problems unsolved. Changing processes
or vendors, or even upgrading to the next software version,
continued to create havoc with the IT infrastructure and
budget.
As a result, to this day, companies typically have only used
standardization for business processes that are or have become
liability processes – costing more than the value they generate,
such as payroll – and seldom require major change. Or the
process no longer provides a competitive edge because of parity,
that is, industry-wide adoption of the process and its enabling
technology. The main focus in these cases is on cost saving and
keeping the underlying IT infrastructure running as efficiently
as possible. This has its advantages, but as we are finding, yesterday’s
liability process, such as procurement, can become an
asset, a differentiator.
The bottom line: with enterprise SOA, you can implement
standards and innovations without disrupting the IT infrastructure
or restricting flexibility. This means that as your
priorities change, you can more easily move a process into the
cost-saving, highly standardized category or make it a more
competitive differentiator. You are free to move around the
world.
Enterprise SOA in Manufacturing
Enterprise SOA, its enabling technology, and new standards
such as ISA-95 are critical to major innovations and
performance improvements in manufacturing.
Consider the information that typical plant managers require.
Their core responsibility is to make sure that production plans
and execution are aligned with the sales forecast and order
volume and are staying within the plant’s budget limits and
feasibility of production.
Such responsibilities require information from many different
applications, including forecasting and order data from customer
relationship management (CRM), production planning
data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain
management (SCM), inventory-level data from warehouse
systems, personnel availability data from human resources,
and transportation data from logistics.
Therefore, today’s manufacturing landscapes are a complex set.
You may have several versions of ERP and multiple distribution,
sales execution, and MES applications. Most of these applications
have been designed for a specific purpose with only limited
support for integration.
The underlying business process, however, requires them to be
at least partially integrated with one another. This discontinuity
is tackled today by two main methods. One is the person serving
as the human integrator, receiving the IT output in reports,
Microsoft Excel sheets, and other forms and manually integrating
them, a laborious, error-prone process. The other method is
to integrate all applications involved into a lead IT application.
Integration on the system level is highly specialized, needing
ongoing support for the APIs. It also only connects applications
to exchange data, and does not integrate the user-interface
layer, which would be a separate effort. In addition, this integration
is static, not allowing any changes without major rework
from the IT department.
Consider what you face if you have multiple plants, each using
an MES from a different vendor and separately integrated with
the ERP application. The integration required you to create a
set of hard-coded connections just to support the data exchange
(see Figure 2). This works at the system level, but it isn’t a
complete solution, leaving you with many problems and voids.
For instance, any information that needs to be displayed to your
personnel is still scattered and different for each plant. When
you want to switch to another MES vendor or add another factory,
you must start a new integration project. In addition, if
your plant manager needs to enhance the scope of the business
processes by including data from warehouse applications, you
have to implement an additional set of custom-designed connections.
As more applications are brought into the picture, IT
issues and problems become more complex, resulting in higher
maintenance costs.
Figure 2: Typical Manufacturing IT Landscape: Inefficiencies of Point-to-Point
Integration
Figure 3: Integrating Manufacturing Systems with Enterprise SOA
An enterprise SOA approach eliminates the problems that
impede the enterprise-wide visibility of your manufacturing
data, the integration of all relevant applications, and your business
adaptability. Enterprise SOA exposes (describes, registers,
and provides connection points to) the necessary functionality
in each of your components and applications by creating a service
interface that provides any application with information on
the functionality available and how to access it.
As a result, for example, the same functionality that provides
your production completion dates and production results to
the MES in one plant is available as services to any other manufacturing
or business application, using the same standards and
protocols. You would proceed in the same way for all other services
needed from ERP, MES, SCM, or CRM applications. All
services are listed in a services repository. A relatively small
application that supports the user interface resides on top of
those services, ultimately mapping the business process.
Figure 3 illustrates how the enterprise SOA structure can enable
such a process. An application can be composed to form a composite
application based on the available services from different
manufacturing systems. Once the services are available in the
repository, users do not need to bother about the source of the
content or the application into which the services are tied. The
technical implementation of such a composite application
requires significantly less technical skill, because the IT person
only needs to go through the service repository to identify the
corresponding services and then stitch the services together
to form the composite application. Today a wide variety of
user-interface technologies are available for forming composite
applications.
SAP Pioneers Enterprise SOA Approach
SAP, a pioneer and thought leader of enterprise SOA, has
developed the platform that supports this architecture and
the industry standards that make it possible. This is the SAP
NetWeaver® platform.
Figure 3 shows SAP NetWeaver in a futuristic manufacturing
scenario, supporting an enterprise services repository consisting
of SAP and software partner services that integrate the factory
floor, MES, and business applications. This repository consists
of such services as Get Order List, Get Actual Production, and
Work Center Performance. In this example, SAP and its software
partners provide these services through a variety of software
applications, such as mySAP™ ERP, and composite applications,
such as SAP® xApp™ Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence
(SAP xMII).
To understand the processes enabled, consider what your
production supervisors, oblivious to the application source,
would be able to access and execute in doing their jobs:
- Through the Get Order List service, they obtain the scheduled
orders for a shift, which reside in mySAP ERP.
- Through Send Order, they can send the orders, based on
priority, to an MES for execution. This is accomplished
through an interface that is based on the ISA-95 standard,
which resides in the standards layer on top of enterprise
services and provides a “B2MML_ProductionSchedule”
message.
- For the running orders, they use the Get Actual Production
service to access the production order status.
- Using Get Actual KPI, production supervisors can monitor
different key performance indicators (KPIs), such as
throughput rate, temperature, and pressure, coming
from a shop floor application.
- Plan/Actual Reports for different KPIs can be monitored
in real time. They are provided by different services coming
from SAP and shop floor systems.
- In parallel, via the Work Center Availability service,
production personnel can monitor work center status.
- Work Center Performance provides them with real-time
performance or overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
measures.
All in all, for each individual role, you can easily implement
a single application that provides a window into the current
status of the plant, critical data, alerts, analysis, and drill
down needed for manufacturing performance.
The SAP NetWeaver platform makes this work. It unifies
technology components – SAP or non-SAP software – into a
single platform and is preintegrated with business applications,
enabling change and reducing the need for custom integration.
For linking your factory floor to the enterprise, SAP provides
SAP xMII, which delivers a single ISA-95-compliant layer enabling
mySAP ERP connectivity into real-time plant floor applications
and a real-time analytics engine that aggregates and delivers
unified visualization of events, alerts, KPIs, and decision support
to your production personnel through role-based dashboards.
Your production personnel can see the whole picture on their
dashboards, drill down for more information, and act upon it.
At the same time, other personnel in your plants and business
offices can access current production information and be
alerted to exceptions, such as equipment breakdowns that
may affect customer deliveries.
Immediate Benefits for Manufacturing
An enterprise service-oriented architecture offers enormous
promise for achieving the adaptability you need in the everchanging
world of manufacturing. The deliverables begin
quickly. Here are several significant and immediate benefits
of the enterprise SOA approach for developing new and
improved applications.
Single Investment in Integration
This architecture requires a single investment to expose all
those services. Once the investment is made, this same service can
be accessed by any application in any possible combination
as long as this application can browse the service repository
to access the services.
New and Improved Business Processes
Exchanging applications or enhancing the business process
support is only a matter of linking one additional application
and its services to the repository. In most cases, you might even
be able to support a new business process completely by just
assembling the right components. Pure integration between
applications is now performed by allowing the underlying
components to directly consume services from other
components.
Decreased Costs per Service
The enterprise SOA approach is vastly different from the traditional
method, which requires a new pair of connections to
be custom designed for each application. With enterprise SOA,
the more connections, the lower the price per connection.
This opens up significant IT dollars for more innovative applications
– a major benefit for companies as they increasingly
distribute manufacturing and each of their plants runs its
own applications.
Semantic Interoperability
Under enterprise SOA, each software component exposes a
service in a standardized way to enable semantic interoperability
with other components. For example, an application using the
XML dialect from vendor A will not necessarily understand the
XML dialect of vendor B, so both must agree to expose a service
via a common standard.
Middleware Eliminated
Because standards enable direct interaction among services,
traditional middleware applications are no longer required.
Because standards enable direct interaction among services,
traditional middleware applications are no longer required.
Next: The Partner Ecosystem
Once you have decided to adopt enterprise SOA, the next step
is to expand and change your relationship with your software
vendors to create a new partner ecosystem. The enterprise SOA
strategy is significantly enhanced and moves to the next level
of flexibility when you include your partners – all the software
providers whose applications support your business processes.
Consider what will happen as you make these services and
the repository available to your partners and you populate the
repository with services that they create. Your IT department
and, in some cases, business users will be able to use visual tools
to assemble many new user applications without having to
write code or having detailed knowledge of the underlying
systems. As you increase the number of services available for
assembly, so too will the operational, competitive, and financial
benefits of enterprise SOA. This makes a common platform
and a new relationship with your software vendors mandatory.
Contact SAP to learn more about how you can build your
road map to an enterprise service-oriented architecture.
For additional information, please visit our Web site at
www.sap.com/netweaver or www.sap.com/platform/esa.
Contents
- Executive Summary
- Enterprise SOA: The “Home Theater System” of Information Technology
- Innovation and Standardization Become Teammates
- Enterprise SOA in Manufacturing
- SAP Pioneers Enterprise SOA Approach
- Immediate Benefits for Manufacturing
- Single Investment in Integration
- New and Improved Business Processes
- Decreased Costs per Service
- Semantic Interoperability
- Middleware Eliminated
- Next: The Partner Ecosystem
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