Dow Chemical Company is rolling out a global
SAP
service oriented architecture (SOA) in a bid to gain a
competitive advantage.
The £24.4bn US-based chemical firm is replacing a 20-year-old
SAP R/2 system with an SOA based on
SAP's Netweaver and
MySAP enterprise resource planning platforms. Dow said it aims
to run its business on the system for the next 20 years.
"The foundation platform we are putting in place will help
enable Dow's new business models well into the future," said
Melanie Kalmar, Dow's information systems programme director.
The project paves the way for other SAP R/2 users to migrate to
SOA, said SAP.
The project will allow Dow, which spent £293m on IT in 2006, to
reuse data definitions and code, speed up application development,
cut system maintenance costs, and support business operations more
quickly and responsively, she said.
To prove the concept, Dow built a
document management system using elements from the SOA to
co-ordinate and streamline the paperwork required for regulatory
approval of a new product.
"We have not yet quantified the results, but the team saw such a
drastic reduction in time that all future chemical products will
take this route. Speed to market is a key competitive advantage in
our industry," Kalmar said.
Dow's SOA, dubbed Next Enterprise Architecture, will go into
production this year. It will replace R/2-based systems and another
legacy system developed in-house.
The first five projects will cover purchasing, work and plant
maintenance, commercial pricing, a platform to leverage joint
ventures Dow has in developing economies, and a message
optimisation platform for tracking correspondence and
documents.
Christian Hastedt-Marckwardt, SAP's solution marketing director
for enterprise SOA, said the project would pave the way for other
SAP users to update technology. "Dow is a key customer for us to
show other SAP R/2 users how to migrate to more modern technology,"
he said.
Kalmar said Netweaver components had matured to the point that
the time was now right to launch the SOA project. "We can implement
them as enterprise services to replace legacy products, which will
allow us to simplify our product and operational structure."
Netweaver's support for non-SAP applications was key to Dow's
decision. "Underlying products and business strategy are different,
but this similarity tells us that the market has found the right
approach, which is built on industry data and messaging standards,"
said Kalmar.
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