10.7. ESA in manufacturingIncorporating enterprise services into SAP's classic suite of packaged applications highlights new opportunities to extend their functionality. One immediately obvious opportunity for manufacturers in nearly every industry is the reconciliation of classical enterprise softwareERP, Supply Chain Management (SCM), and the likewith traditionally incompatible shop-floor automation and execution systems. Only by linking the business processes of the larger enterprise to the actual point of manufacture will these companies be able to realize the larger vision of adaptive manufacturingi.e., the ability to respond with maximum speed and flexibility to sudden changes in their supply chains or in the business logic of the greater enterprise. SAP's solution to this challenge is SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII), formerly known as Lighthammer, which uses SAP NetWeaver XI and industry standards such as S95 to connect these incompatible systems. It does so using a layer of enterprise services deployed as connectors, on top of which reside analytical tools capable of extracting real-time data from plant automation and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) used to drive a broad range of KPIs for alerts and performance dashboards. Using these tools, it becomes possible to visualize processesorder statuses, yields, start and stop rates, etc.and merge that data with KPIs and business processes stored in ERP systems. As the integration of these systems continues, it becomes possible to create entirely new business objects storing KPI data or production orders that link to and automatically update the corresponding data in each system. The xApp and its corresponding services can be used as an integration and visualization toolbox; it is a composite application that concentrates all of the underlying functionality conveniently in one place. Just as important, it provides all of these things through role-based interfaces designed to deliver the appropriate amount of information to each user at critical moments. For the plant manager, that may take the form of an alert warning of a massive disruption when a critical process fails; for the shop-floor manager, it's a detailed readout of real-time KPIs. In both cases, this functionality previously existed but was disconnected and packaged inside of inflexible interfaces. Now, using enterprise services as the foundation, it's possible to use SAP xMII as the connection and platform upon which to aggregate and reaggregate data generated on both sidesproduction data from the floor and business performance data arriving from analytical engines elsewhere in the companyin new business processes that will yield competitive advantage. |