6.4 Summary

---

In Chapter 5, we concluded that such integration is necessary to cope with the demands of both the system level and all components (subsystems) during the entire life cycle. In this chapter, we have concentrated on the analysis of PDM and SCM integration.

We can identify three levels of integration:

1. Full integration: Building one homogenous system containing both the SCM and PDM system. Unfortunately this is very difficult to implement—especially a common repository with a common information model.

2. Loose integration: The systems communicating with each other to keep data stored locally and accessible from both systems. The main challenge in this type of integration is to keep data consistent in the entire system. Several possible implementation solutions exist with different trade-offs.

3. No integration: Currently perhaps the most common solution, but it requires a lot of manual intervention, which is slow and carries a big risk of introducing inconsistencies into the system.

Concluding that a loose integration is the most (if not the only) realistic solution, the data managed by the total system were divided into seven categories depending on where it should be stored and how it should be accessed from the two systems integrated. Setting up integration prerequisites based on the analysis, two scenarios of user interaction were examined, resulting in detailed sequence diagrams of required operations for all APIs involved.

This chapter ends with two concrete examples of integration actually being developed, one by the end user and one by the vendors of the systems integrated. These examples show that integration on this level is possible and promising, but also that this is the first faltering step, with a lot still left undone.

---