Managing Automation - March 2008 - (Page 21)

acquired plants in four to six weeks, he says. Because Celestica’s plant-to-enterprise integration push started well before vendors such as SAP and Visiprise got serious about supporting such integration — and before many standards were in place — Celestica was forced to develop the integrations, including data and semantic mappings and process definitions, itself. “We were operating in a completely siloed world,” Nithiyeswaran says. “[Vendors] were not designing their systems with this type of integration in mind. That left customers like ourselves to deal with the problem and to come up with our own internal solutions to inconsistencies in the designs.” Celestica was able to justify the investment in such development because it was essential to delivering on the company’s business strategy of responding quickly to customers’ changing business needs, Nithiyeswaran says. But Celestica, along with a few other integration pioneers, began pushing for its vendors to provide out-of-the-box plant-to-enterprise integrations. In recent years, vendors have begun doing just that. SAP and Visiprise, for example, have collaborated to develop integrations between their systems that parallel Celestica’s links between its order management and MES systems and between ERP and finished goods in- ventory/material consumption. Vendors including SAP, Oracle, Rockwell Automation, and Visiprise have also begun to incorporate the data and process definitions of industr y standards such as ISA-95 into their products. Nithiyeswaran calls those developments encouraging, although Celestica is still using its internally developed integrations to tie together plant and ERP systems. Celestica will switch to the vendor-provided integrations once they have matured. “SAP and Visiprise are in the early stages of their integration,” Nithiyeswaran says. “They are going through the same series of states we did.” But Celestica is not standing still. The company plans next to develop an integration between Visiprise and its quality management, which would allow the company to quickly track quality deviations back to specific plant production processes. Before Celestica can implement such cross-functional processes, however, it needs to standardize on a single quality management system. Today the company has several different systems spread throughout its plants. Not surprisingly, in selecting a new quality management system, Celestica will be keenly focused on which vendor provides out-of-the-box integration with Visiprise. “That will play a key role in our choosing a platform on which to standardize,” Nithiyeswaran says. Celestica Inc. ● ● ● Industry: Electronics manufacturing Size: $8.8 billion Integration Initiative: Internally developed integrations among SAP ERP, Visiprise MES, and Dassault Systemes’ MatrixOne product data management systems Benefits to Date: Streamlined engineering change order and customer order-to-production order processes and improved visibility into global material consumption and finished goods inventories ● 21 March 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Managing Automation - March 2008

Managing Automation - March 2008 Contents Take 1 Mailbox Mitsubishi, IBM, and ILS Team Up to Make Integration Easy for Automakers Former Agile Exec Takes the Reins at Arena Solutions The Next Phase for 2006’s PM Award Winner Integration Firm Boomi Redesigns for On-Demand Ex-Wonderware Chief Takes Helm at Apprion Notes Cover Story: A Rare Breed Special Report: Where are Control Architectures Heading? Transformation: Back to Reality Integration: Getting Standards Under One Roof Industries: The Quest for the Perfect Order Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - March 2008

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