IT directors can help simplify the diversity of
manufacturing systems in the business by implementing an efficient
SOA platform, says Colin Masson
Of all the opportunities presented by service oriented
architecture (SOA), the brightest lies in manufacturing. But
implementing SOA in manufacturing requires much higher fidelity, or
more closely specified, services, event definition and monitoring
than in other sectors, as well as the deterministic orchestration
of services and the execution of triggered and scheduled
workflows.
If it is to be successful in the sector, IT needs to think
beyond enterprise SOA, business process management and business
activity monitoring towards the real and immediate requirements for
high-fidelity manufacturing, operations process management and
real-time event monitoring.
Manufacturing software is catching up on 20 years of pent-up
demand, and finally getting the attention it deserves after gross
underfunding relative to its contribution to the bottom line. Even
so, it will still be difficult to catch up on the applications
backlog.
There is no equivalent for manufacturing of SAP, i2 or
MatrixOne, which deliver on the demand for enterprise-class
applications. The market for commercial manufacturing execution
system (MES) software has only just broken through the $1bn mark.
At best, the commercial market for all manufacturing software may
be £2.5bn to £3bn – a far cry from today’s £10bn ERP market.
IT spending research suggests that almost two-thirds of the
manufacturing investment will be on in-house applications
development and the extensive customisation of manufacturing
applications. It is a market ripe for the efficient development of
composite applications and service providers.
But manufacturing may continue to resist standard applications
deployment. The vast majority of MES suppliers have built their
applications on Microsoft .net technologies even though composite
applications have also been around for a long time in manufacturing
– long before the term was associated with SOA.
No one has developed a universal manufacturing model that
addresses a cross-section of the manufacturing styles in process
and discrete industries.
There is still no convergence on a standard set of manufacturing
processes, nor integrated software functionality to allow MES
suppliers to achieve the economies of scale that their ERP
counterparts take for granted.
Building composite applications was a necessity in manufacturing
long before the SOA label appeared, and manufacturing is well
placed to be the first demonstrable beneficiary of broad SOA
adoption.
The landscape is fragmented along industry lines – largely based
on type of manufacturing. An MES for batch manufacture bears little
resemblance to an MES targeted at low-volume, engineer-to-order
discrete production scenarios. Similarly, advanced process
simulation/control (APS/APC) applications do not crop up in
manufacturing environments with little or no automation and process
control.
Legacy systems add to the complexity. Historically,
manufacturing plants operate autonomously and with tight cost
constraints. Software is purchased at the plant level with a focus
on cost containment – in other words, purchases have been tactical,
not strategic.
As a result, a big manufacturer may operate 40 or more plants,
many of them acquired through mergers, and the software landscape
within each plant is often dramatically different.
This complexity has been, and will continue to be, a major
driving force for supplier adoption of SOA for manufacturing
operations. Suppliers serving this space have been compelled to
embrace web services to create standard interfaces to legacy
assets, preserving the value of their IT investments and obtaining
leverage from them in new ways.
A critical next step is to define the process for maintaining
these “new” services: defining how they should be used, who can use
them, and the performance and version requirements to maintain
usefulness. Manufacturing is a market ripe for applying the more
efficient SOA development model to the backlog of composite
applications.
Higher fidelity is required for manufacturing SOA, operations
process management and real-time event monitoring. By contrast, IT
architectures for enterprise SOA, business process management and
business activity monitoring are grounded in the low-fidelity world
of business systems, with well-defined business processes, data
models and transactions.
Time-based competition and the need for business process
innovation is stimulating a desire to remodel the current
generation of monolithic business applications on more flexible
process platforms.
So while you are waiting for your ERP supplier to deliver this
new business process platform, or convincing the business that the
subsequent and massive redeployment will be worth it, manufacturing
services are already widely available and, frankly, are the only
pragmatic way of realising the compelling supply chain benefits
from demand-driven manufacturing.
However, you will need to augment your enterprise SOA with
higher fidelity capabilities to leverage highly distributed
manufacturing SOA.
Colin Masson is research director at AMR Research
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