Enterprise SOA

ESA in manufacturing

Incorporating 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 software—ERP, Supply Chain Management (SCM), and the like—with 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 manufacturing—i.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 processes—order 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 ...