Enterprise SOA

ESA in the chemicals industry

The chemicals industry is more or less split in two along the lines of its business models: specialty manufacturers racing to develop their next hit product—the secret ingredient in a new form of fuel, or paint, or plastic—and commodity manufacturers reliably producing massive amounts of bulk ingredients for industrial consumers a few links down the supply chain. Chemical companies in both camps are looking to ESA and enterprise services as a method for integrating their increasingly far-flung operations in an era of global consolidation. While specialty manufacturers are seeking help in managing their product portfolios and accelerating the pace of new-product development, commodity manufacturers are looking to maximize the efficiency of their operations further by finally linking their enterprise applications with the automation and execution systems on the shop floor.

SAP has already begun using enterprise services to create xApps that serve all of these needs. SAP xMII connects ERP applications to the shop floor using SAP NetWeaver XI and industry standards such as S95 to deploy a layer of enterprise services as connectors, on top of which reside analytical tools capable of extracting real-time data from plant automation and MES and running it through a range of KPIs. The next step is to begin recomposing functionality already in place to create new roles and processes—alert mechanisms and digital dashboards that will drive the management-by-exception ...