SOA:
Every manufacturing plant needs to operate as efficiently as possible within the limits of its budget. In the past, reaching this seemingly simple goal was almost impossible for most manufacturing sites because of the lack of integration between plant systems and business systems. Plants were forced to fly blind, resulting in less-than-optimal production output and inventory levels.
The reason for this discrepancy? Most plant information systems were designed to run a plant, and connectivity to any other system or application was an afterthought. Until the last five to seven years, few manufacturers even mentioned that they needed the automation layer, the manufacturing execution system (MES) layer, and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) layer to be able to talk to each other.
However, as the need grew to share data among plants within a distributed manufacturing network, IT developers cobbled together direct links between the different layers of applications. This kind of point-to-point integration made sense at the time, but it has resulted in a cobweb of hundreds, even thousands, of brittle interfaces. The complexity of linking large and disperse landscapes has literally crippled the health and flexibility of most manufacturing IT architectures and hence business performance.
Adapting those systems and applications to communicate can take so long that entire generations of business opportunities can grow old while the IT department fiddles with the wiring. Over time, more innovative industries, such as electronics, have solved the same problem deviling IT by implementing standardized ways to assemble components into a product, enabling parts to be replaced and extended – plug and play. This process is now actually taking place in the IT industry. In this instance, software called composite applications is built by assembling components that can be exchanged and upgraded at will.
The underlying concept is enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), which allows you to change and improve your business processes without an expensive IT integration project. With enterprise SOA, you can simply replace or add components to create new processes: the software version of plug and play.
Enterprise SOA goes beyond the fundamentals of a serviceoriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a distributed software model that uses independent Web services to support business processes, but the enterprise SOA approach – as defined by SAP and its partners and customers – elevates the design, composition, and management of Web services through the use of enterprise services.
This white paper describes enterprise SOA and the business opportunities it creates for manufacturers. To clarify this concept, we begin by describing the parallel paths followed by software and electronics developers into the new era of plug and play.
Why is an enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) critical to manufacturing today? It’s all about the flexibility and adaptability that enterprise SOA gives you to integrate the factory floor with enterprise applications and to make needed changes to your processes without the enormous cost and time of creating new interfaces.
The home theater system and its evolution provide a striking analogy to information technology’s trek to enterprise SOA and the required technology platform. Consider what you can do with today’s home theater system. You are blessed with very sophisticated, yet easy-to-use techniques to connect your TV, music system, DVD player, iPod, and other components to your home theater. You do not need to know in detail how they work, nor do you need to call technicians at all these vendors to install them. In fact you probably would be upset if such technical support was needed. Today all system components support a set of standard input and output connection points and corresponding adapters. Through the Internet or your vendor, you can obtain a manual of each component, which lists the supported adapters and how to connect all these systems (see Figure 1.)
As shown in Figure 1, you can go though the manual provided by the vendor of the home theater system and easily connect other equipment without knowing how each component is designed. What matters here is the clear connection point and type of the adapter, no matter which vendor provides the adapter. All your audio and video components, regardless of their differences, appear as an integrated unit. Using the remote control, you can switch between components, for instance, from the DVD player to the VCR, to use the whole unit in a different way.
