Managing Automation - December 2008 - (Page 27)

As early adopters found, a services-oriented architecture alone won’t solve pressing business problems. SOA’s second wave requires BPM, governance, and common data structures. BY STEPHANIE NEIL 27 December 2008 Photo: Taylor Jackson anufacturers are not all cut from the same cloth. They have different priorities in their day-to-day struggles to gain and keep a competitive edge. For example: ● Beckman Coulter, a manufacture of biomedical test equipment, needed a way to integrate its newly acquired companies with an existing ERP system. ● Engine manufacturer Detroit Diesel Corp. was looking for an efficient way to map business processes related to quality certification. ● Arla Foods, a Denmark-based dairy company, needed to integrate heterogeneous manufacturing systems to support a unified production approach. ● Mazda Australia aimed to open up its B2B dealer communication channels. While these manufacturers face different business issues, they have one thing in common: They are using software that incorporates a services-oriented architecture — otherwise known as SOA — to tackle the challenges before them. But, unlike vendors and other experts who not long ago touted SOA as the silver bullet that would solve the sensor-to-boardroom integration issue, provide businesses with the flexibility needed to survive the ever-changing competitive landscape, and enable manufacturers to act on shifting partnership requirements and customer needs, these manufacturers see SOA as simply another tool in their technology toolbox. And it’s often considered an invisible part of a complete solution that must also include more mature Web standards, robust master data management, SOA governance policies, and semantic standards that describe common manufacturing business processes. “We didn’t think about SOA,” says Aaron Troschinetz, quality systems supervisor at Detroit Diesel, a subsidiary of Daimler. “We were just looking for a tool to help us achieve quality certification.” The SOA concept is based on a set of Web standards that define self-describing software services that can extract information from a given application, regardless of programming language. But, back in the day when IBM first began talking about WebSphere, SAP started pushing NetWeaver, and Microsoft was singing .NET’s praises, not many manufacturers really understood what SOA was. That’s because the discussions focused on Internet standards, such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, the technical building blocks of SOA that interested IT developers creating application programs, but meant little to plant managers trying to keep the production process running. Nevertheless, enterprise application, automation, and middleware vendors, alike, told manufacturers that this technology would provide them the agility they needed to excel in business. On the surface, it all sounded great, until the question was asked: Where can I get this SOA? Well, don’t try Staples, Best Buy, or Office Depot. “SOA is not a thing you can buy,” says Richard Watson, an analyst at the Bur ton Group. “It is an architectural approach and a set of design principles.” Even now, implementing an SOA can be a somewhat disjointed exercise. Though the concept is based on open standards and design principles, each vendor sets up its ser vicesbased architecture slightly differently. That means custom logic is required to interface disparate SOA-based enterprise applications as well as manufacturing systems. Also, extra work is needed to use SOA to knit together plant and enterprise systems. Keep in mind that manufacturing is based on distributed real-time data versus the enterprise’s centralized transactional data. At the same time, systems from the two worlds use vastly different terminology and semantics. Filling the gap is not as easy as slapping an enterprise service bus into the mix to carry messages between the two domains. “SOA on the plant floor needs to be the bridge between the synchronous, centralized, homogeneous back office and the highly diverse, asynchronous real world,” says Jay Mellon, executive

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

Managing Automation - December 2008 Contents Take 1 Business Objects Chief Says Union with SAP Meets Objectives After One Year Yes, Emerson, Too, Is in the MES Market Infor Chief Puts Off IPO, Restarts Buying Plans Kronos Now Tracks Shop Floor Machines IQMS Rolls Out User Interace, Other Upgrades Notes Five Ideas for Demand Planning Building on the SOA Blueprint Innovation Now A Team Effort Lean %2B Technology = LEAN^2 Finding Flaws Before They Spread Product Scan Advertiser Index Next

Managing Automation - December 2008

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