Managing Automation - December 2008 - (Page 28)

[ SPECIAL REPORT ] vice president of business development at As One Technologies Inc., the maker of an eventdriven service platform for manufacturing that some experts are calling the first real manufacturing service bus. Rather than just adding a Web service wrapper around an application, the As One development toolkit can be used to model various systems on the plant floor — PLCs, SCADA, or MES, for example — through reusable agent libraries. These are object-based autonomous agents in a component library. The result is a ground-up approach to delivering SOA as opposed to wrapping Internet standards around an existing application. It is a giant leap forward in the world of SOA-based manufacturing systems, observers say. Yet, it is a development toolkit rather than a complete solution, which can cause manufacturers to scratch their heads in confusion. FAIL-SAFE SOA Some manufacturers, however, are beginning to break through the SOA confusion. When Mazda Australia, for example, decided to open up its B2B channels to allow dealers and business partners to directly communicate with Mazda’s factor y to order spare parts, the company also made a commitment to open standards. Having heard of SOA, Mazda managers thought it was a logical choice for enabling real-time data exchange. But the technology wasn’t easily understood. “We’ve found that organizations in all sectors are taking a more pragmatic approach to SOA.” — Vordel’s Morris “I must admit, we didn’t know a great deal about it when we first started,” says Tim Ballingall, national systems manager for Mazda Australia. Most of Mazda Australia’s systems are developed in-house, including CRM, service, warranty, and sales management, so it took a lot of testing to understand how Web standards, such as XML, would work with Mazda’s systems. The approach that Mazda took started with policies and data governance. Rather than developing the SOA infrastructure first, the company layered an XML gateway appliance from Vordel Limited onto its network and established policies for how Web services would be created, changed, and reused. The appliance frees the company’s existing servers from having to do the heavy lifting of parsing, validating, and transforming XML messages as they come in from dealers. Mazda is using the XML gateway to avoid duplicating effort, which wastes time and could introduce data error. When exchanging information with dealers on vehicle sales and reser vations, those business transactions need to be recorded in two separate systems. Using XML B2B Web services, sale and customer reservation transactions are entered only once, and data, including model and pricing information, is updated in the appropriate systems. Additional transactions are planned in the future, Ballingall says, including more vehicle detail, such as warranty, service, and customer information, all of which traditionally would require a dealer to access separate Mazda Australia systems. By all accounts, the project has been a success. “A good gauge of effectiveness is how well the technology aligns to the strategic business objectives,” Ballingall says. “We could achieve our aims with other technologies as long as we remained committed to the B2B strategy. SOA and XML gateways, however, WSTF Tests SOA in the Real World A services-oriented architecture starts with the underlying structure of Web standards that is an alphabet soup of acronyms: XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI, to name a few. For years, groups such as the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) have been testing these standards, which dictate how Web services are created, how they behave, and how they seamlessly work together. But WS-I stops short of offering real-world business scenarios that prove SOA-enabled applications not only function, but also add value to the organization. Recently, a group of about a dozen vendors and end users united under the banner of the Web Services Test Forum (WSTF) to establish interoperability scenario-based testing that reflects business processes at the enterprise level. In this model, the standards and specifications are considered within an end-to-end context. “This forum develops test cases that are scenario-based and reflect more closely how these specifications get used in a particular context,” says Shivajee Samdarshi, senior director of engineering at TIBCO, a vendor partner in the WSTF organization. For example, WSTF will set forth specific business scenarios, such as a purchase order that requires tracking. In this case, the WSTF will work backward, using the business scenario as the standard for defining what Web specifications are needed to support the process. If reliable messaging is an important aspect of that scenario, WSTF will define the Web service security standards that should be invoked. The purpose of WSTF is not to standardize business processes. Rather it is to test the underlying SOA technology using business scenarios as the baseline. The group is organized to be an open source test model in which any technology contributed to the group is made available to the public royalty-free. The group operates independently of WS-I, but a reciprocal relationship enables WSTF to feed test results back to the organizations defining the standards. “Because of the nature of how this group is supposed to function, we’ve taken specifications that are not even standards yet and coupled them with things that will happen based on our experience developing the scenarios,” Samdarshi says. “Then we can identify areas that WS-I should look at. So we are doing the legwork to identify what might happen and then we ask WS-I to tackle it.” ma December 28 2008

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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