Manufacturing Executive - March/April 2009 - (Page 46) SPECIAL REPORT “We are capable of creating interfaces for a lot more applications in a much shorter time period, so the ROI is the reduced development costs,” Giang says. In some cases, manufacturers can make use of common data structures based on the business language standards outlined by the Open Applications Group (OAGi). The Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) 9.0 includes naming and design rules, as well as guidelines for creating XML Schema. Companies use it to create a canonical model for application integration that provides a common business language based on business object documents for CRM, logistics, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, among other tasks. Groups such as OAGi and the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organisation are working to establish common data structures that can be combined with Web standards to make SOA more useful. But the next step is to establish a model of how SOA works within common business scenarios (see sidebar, p. 47). In order to incorporate business scenarios into SOA, better orchestration of processes, also known as BPM, is needed. a new world of possibilities on how to manage processes,” Troschinetz says. Before ARIS, Detroit Diesel documented and reengineered processes using Excel spreadsheets and even what Troschinetz calls the “brown paper approach,” in which processes were documented on large sheets of paper pinned to the wall and each step was highlighted with Post-it notes. “ARIS can manage a database of information and within a few keystrokes, update layers of processes at once,” he says. However, Troschinetz says, changing the business process also means changing human behavior. That’s why he holds BPM workshops to ensure that the tool is being used. M Content Calls business process “ It is reallyorchestration of themanagement, or things that have to be achieved, that provides the flexibility. Director of Strategic Business Solutions Group, Software AG “SOA is all of the pieces, but it needs context,” says Dave Brooks, director of strategic business solutions group at Software AG. “It is really business process management, or orchestration of the things that have to be achieved from the business perspective, that provides the flexibility.” Detroit Diesel recognized the connections linking SOA, process management, and a lean enterprise. The mapping tool the company uses for business process analysis is the ARIS BPM modeling software from IDS Scheer, which is built on an SOA. After parent company Daimler implemented ARIS BPM modeling tools, Detroit Diesel’s Troschinetz adopted the same software to define and implement processes that enable his team to track quality certification for everything from engine manufacturing to purchasing, finance, sales, and service. “From a functionality standpoint, it opened up “ Dave Brooks anufacturers are learning that simply deploying SOA infrastructure is not enough to support big integration projects. They also need business terminology and semantics that are commonly understood across the enterprise. Arne Svendsen, head of manufacturing services and automation at Arla Foods’ global IT group, for example, has been pioneering the company’s One Arla effort, which aims to unify production processes across 65 global sites and eventually tie them together with ERP. Although work began several years ago, Arla Foods is only about halfway through the MES standardization part of the project. To date, only 10 sites have started integration between Wonderware’s MES system and Arla’s SAP ERP system. “That’s primarily because it’s only been in the last two years that the business case [around integration] has taken off,” Svendsen says. On top of lacking a strong business case, a roadblock has been resolving how disparate systems interpret data. To that end, Arla needs more than Web standards. It needs content standards so that the different systems it relies on use common terminologies. Arla’s MES vendor, Wonderware, has packaged Web standards within component libraries that include Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML), an XML implementation of the ISA-95 integration standard that defines a common terminology around production schedules. It is common terminologies — how recipes are defined, for instance — that can make or break an SOA deployment, Svendsen says. And while B2MML is a good first step, he adds, there is more work to be done. “Call it semantic standards,” Svendsen says. “But we need groups like the compliance institute to 46 Manufacturing Executive MAR/APR-09
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