Managing Automation - January 2009 - (Page 26) DEEPDIVE agility pal at SAP Business Objects. Also, many providers are focusing on making their software more relevant, particularly to operational users on the plant floor or elsewhere in the manufacturing enterprise. ERP and MES vendors are doing this by replacing generic software user interfaces with new, highly graphical UIs designed for individuals performing specific roles and including dashboards with KPIs relevant to those roles. ERP vendor Infor, for example, recently rolled out Infor MyDay, which can be configured for individuals in specific roles and includes real-time KPIs that will be built on top of the company’s Infor Decisions embedded business analytics platform. ERP vendors IQMS and Microsoft are moving in a similar direction, as is Aspen Technology Inc., a provider of engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing software for process manufacturers. ALARMS AND ALERTS But agility isn’t only about getting access to real-time information coming from the plant floor or across the supply network. It’s also about being able to respond quickly when those KPIs indicate that something has gone wrong. To enable that, several ERP, supply chain, and MOM software vendors have begun enabling their systems with rules engines and alerting capabilities that can automatically spot a worrying exception and notify individuals in a position to take action. Supply chain management software and managed service provider Sterling Commerce, for example, recently added a Supply Chain Visibility option to its on-demand supply chain management network. Sterling Supply Chain Visibility automatically tracks specific types of transactions as they move across the network and, using a rules engine, monitors expected responses. An EDI 850 purchase order, for example, should be followed by order acknowledgment within one hour. If that does not happen, Sterling SC Visibility automatically sends an alert to the process owner. Other supply chain technology providers such as Kinaxis enable similar automated alerts, as do ERP vendors such as IQMS and MOM software vendors, including Apriso, Wonderware, and Intercim. Several of those vendors, including Wonderware and OSIsoft, are working with Microsoft to integrate that vendor’s Unified Communication infrastructure into their products so that alerts can be dynamically directed to different communications technologies, including e-mail, mobile phones, and instant messaging, says Chris Colyer, worldwide solutions director for manufacturing at Microsoft. Even as vendors roll out new technologies intended to improve manufacturers’ agility, many of them — and their customers — are haunted by an inconvenient truth: Many of the systems that manufacturers have deployed in the past to streamline and integrate business processes have reduced agility. That’s because many legacy applications, particularly those developed in the client/server technology era, can’t easily be modified, integrated, or customized for changing business requirements. But software vendors are beginning to fix that barrier to agility, using services-oriented architecture and business process management (BPM) technology as well as new software deployment options such as softwareas-a-ser vice (SaaS). Having used SOA standards and techniques to make their new systems more modular and easier to integrate, vendors such as SAP, Epicor, IFS, and Wonderware are beginning to layer on BPM tools that allow manufacturers to easily create or modify their own business processes without going through the difficult, time-consuming step of modifying application source code. Epicor’s Service Connect, for example, is a BPM environment that users of the company’s newer applications can use to easily modify or extend their enterprise applications. Similarly, Wonderware’s ArchestrA SOA architecture allows its MES applications to be easily modified through pre-written templates. By allowing once monolithic applications such as ERP to be broken up into modules, SOA is also enabling vendors to give manufacturers new deployment options that support agility. A growing number of vendors, including QAD, let manufacturers configure their enterprise applications with different virtual instances. When manufacturers launch or make changes to remote plants and legal entities, they can deploy these virtual instances of the software to support those new entities rather than deploying a new physical instance. Along the same lines, growing numbers of enterprise application providers, including SAP, QAD, and Infor, are offering their software as a service, giving manufacturers the option of growing, shrinking, and changing their deployments without the constraint of managing the servers and networks themselves. “Global manufacturers need to operate some processes with a global view and some with more of a local view, and they need to accommodate constant change,” QAD’s Fleming says. “Things like virtual instances and software-as-a-service give them more options, more flexibility, and ultimately more agility.” s ma January 26 2009
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.