This paper discusses an approach to process orchestration framework in a manufacturing environment that provides a high degree of flexibility for change with good visibility into the business process execution that helps overcoming these challenges.
Manufacturing companies continue to face challenges in aligning business strategy with business processes. Even when leading companies make an effort to share and integrate with their partners, most of them rely on a highly manual process and information from a tangle of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Data Management (PDM), Workflow, Web and legacy applications and so on to coordinate order fulfillment across corporate divisions and external partners. Developing an end-to-end business process or even one that crosses one or more functional corporate boundaries is made more difficult by the existence of functional software systems.
On one hand, current BPM offerings focus on addressing human-to-human processes, but do not completely handle transactional processes, and do not manage product data. On the other, PLM provide significant value but there are no fully integrated offerings in the market that fully cover every aspect of a product lifecycle. Other solutions are employed to enable manufacturing, sales and service aspects of these product lifecycles. The integration of all these product related processes require both connectivity and cross application support in a way that entails both process and data integration.
This paper discusses an approach to process orchestration framework in a manufacturing environment that provides a high degree of flexibility for change with good visibility into the business process execution that helps overcoming these challenges.
INTRODUCTION
PLM components provide significant value but there are no fully integrated offerings in the market that perfectly cover every aspect of product life cycle. Manufacturing companies have to integrate data and process in order to develop a full solution. PLM’S primary function is to define, develop and manage the product definition. Other solutions are employed to manage manufacturing, sales and other service aspects of these product cycles. The integration of these product related processes require both connectivity and cross application support in a way that entails both data and process integration.
Integration across PLM, MES, ERP, Legacy application manufacturing organization would help the organization to discover their manufacturing problems earlier which ensures- higher product quality, shorter product development cycles due to enhanced communication, faster ramp up of the production of new products, easier compliance with government regulations through track and trace mechanisms. FraME helps these systems get integrated through a process monitoring dashboard and gives a real time, single view update of what's happening in different systems and alerts users of any potential errors.
MAIN SECTION
Manufacturing organizations do not have real time visibility and are not able to monitor the different manufacturing processes as the manufacturing systems are tightly integrated. There is lack of process visibility on the business translations and the time required to implement the manufacturing processes is quite high as they have to depend on manual processes.
Engineering Change Management is one among such different Manufacturing processes where there is tight integration between the systems which leads to less visibility among the business transactions. Typical Current ECM process involves the following steps
1. Sales request or a new product introduction triggers the Engineering Change Order (ECO) process. The triggered ECO has to go through various levels of approval stages.
2. After the ECO has been approved PLM interacts with MES to download the product information into MES.
3. PLM then sends the inventory BOM items to inventory systems. Further, PLM then sends the costing details and required BOM items to costing system.
4. Finally PLM updates the product information, lead time and supplier information.
SOLUTION APPROACH – FRAMEWORK FOR MANUFACTURING EXECUTION (FraME)
Existing frameworks provided a holistic framework for improving manufacturing operations efficiency and collaboration between engineering and manufacturing systems. However our customer survey indicated that 86% of our customers want to address Process Orchestration; 65% of the customers need Vertical specific out of the box templates and dashboards as enhancements. Thereby the framework was enhanced as what we now know as “FraME”.
ISA 95 is an international standard for developing an automated inter phase between enterprise and control systems. FraME, which is based on a BPEL concept, adheres to this standard.
FraME - ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGE
FraME is a product and technology agnostic tool which helps to capture generic and domain related processes as BPEL scripts based on best practices. It helps in integration across applications in engineering, shop floor and enterprise.
Even when leading companies make an effort to share and integrate with their partners, most of them rely on a highly manual process and information from a tangle of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Product Data Management (PDM), Workflow, Web and legacy applications and so on to coordinate order fulfillment across corporate divisions and external partners. FraME leverages BPEL and provides an automated way of orchestrating the processes and captures best practices as an executable script. The benefit is in reduced effort required for any changes in any of the participating systems as well as applying the best practices to a new environment and thereby reducing the time to deploy. These scripts could be run using any system that supports variety of industry standard BPEL scripts like MS BizTalk Server, Oracle BEPL Process Manager and IBM Web Sphere Business Integration Server Foundation. FraME also helps in enablement by providing process templates for vertical focused business processes as well as vertical focused standard analytics, reports and dashboards. FraME makes use of the MII for providing the analytics, reports and dashboards thereby making sure that a widely accepted platform is used for easy integration and maintenance.
FraME Process Orchestration happens through Biz talk server, .NET web service Component (SOA/WOA). It integrates PLM, MES, Inventory System, Costing and Sales and Distribution System. FraME manages and monitors the process orchestration execution and tracks the log which helps in checking the status and updates. It provides a real time update about the status of process orchestration through the dashboard.
FEATURES
FraME has a generic tool i.e. Process Orchestration Dashboard that provides unified visualization of events that supports the real-time status monitoring for any configured systems in FraME. Within a single view, we can clearly quantify the businesses performance across a wide range of processes with real-time information that is tied directly to the execution. It also captures the overall process performance of different systems
The Architecture allows configuration of system names and parameters to be displayed. The required business systems can be configured for real time monitoring in FraME.
In case of the above mentioned ECM process FraME shows a real time view of PLM, MES, Sales and Distribution, Inventory and costing system, ECM process execution status along with time log details. It also provides execution log information of each individual system. The Log information can be configured as per the implementation needs.
Execution log information of PLM system captures ECO status, Basic information about ECO along with BOM. Execution log information of MES system captures assembly item’s key information along with BOM items of ECO and workflow name as generated from the MES system is linked with the ECO. It displays the basic information as well as the BOM details. Basic information such as part type, device version along with package code and workflow code can be visualized in real time. BOM showcases the item level information. Log information helps in tracking the status
Execution log information of Sales and Distribution system captures ECO information along with the relevant BOM items with lead-times, Supplier name etc. It shows the basic information about the part type, lifecycle phase and package details. Execution log information of Inventory Management system captures In/Out relationship among the BOM items and the workflow name as extracted from MES systems for tracking. This serves a master data for Inventory to track the movement of lots in MES and provide visibility to costing and order status.
CASE STUDY
Scenario: Integration of PLM, MES, Inventory, Costing, Sales and Distribution through FraME process monitoring dashboard for Engineering Change Management process
Business challenges:
1. Frequent changes in sales order (30 change request per month)and many new product initiatives (6 new product introductions per month)
2. Varying customer demand
3. Tight 1-1 integration between PLM, MES, Inventory, Costing, Sales and Distribution
4. Lack of process visibility on business translation
5. Longer lead time to implement the process
6. Dependency on human manual processes and information from a tangle of ERP, SCM, CRM, PLM and legacy application
Solution Approach:
1. Process Orchestration through Biz talk server, .NET web service Component (SOA/WOA)
2. Provides a Integrated system through FraME for integrating PLM, MES, Costing, Inventory and sales and distribution
3. Managing and monitoring the process execution
CONCLUSION
FraME process monitoring dashboards help manufacturing organizations to gain real time visibility across enterprise and help manage the process value chain at finger-tips through BPEL orchestration. FraME stitches and executes different manufacturing processes and provides unified visualization of events that supports the real-time status monitoring for any configured systems in FraME. It captures the audit trail information of different manufacturing systems and provides a single window view. Since FraME is product and technology agnostic it can be used to model any business architecture of organization. It enforces compliance in partner/supplier ecosystem through boundary-less deployment and enforces process optimization through process duration thresholds. FraME removes dependency on manual processes and information from a tangle of ERP, SCM, CRM, PLM and legacy applications.
REFERENCES
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee265722(BTS.10).aspx
CONTACT
Arunima Thakur is the Head of Vertical Solutions for Discrete and Industrial Manufacturing practice at HCL.
Arunima has over 18 years of leadership experience and her areas of expertise include manufacturing operations management, MRP, Lean, and Six Sigma consulting.
Arunima’s e-mail id is [email protected]
Arunima’s Educational qualifications include
1. A Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering
2. A Master’s Degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, WVU; followed by e-learning - (business discipline) from HBRP and U21.
3. General Motors Leadership Training from GMI, Ford Design Institute Training, Lean certification, Six Sigma certification(s)
Vinay Kolhar has over 2 years of experience in Discrete and Industrial Manufacturing practice at HCL.
Vinay’s e-mail id is [email protected]
Vinay’s educational background includes a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering followed by MBA from Symbiosis, Pune
DEFINITIONS, ACRONYMS, ABBREVIATIONS
FRAME FRAMEWORK FOR MANUFACTURING EXECUTION
MES MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEM
PLM PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
S&D SALES & DISTRIBUTION
SCM SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
CRM CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
PDM PRODUCT DATA MANAGEMENT
ECO ENGINEERING CHANGE ORDER
ECM ENGINEERING CHANGE MANAGEMENT
BOM BILL OF MATERIAL
BPEL BUSINESS PROCESS EXECUTION LANGUAGE
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