Business News
Rockwell Automation Helps Improve Efficiency and Performance for Manufacturing Operations with its ERP Integration Gateway
Tuesday 31. August 2010 - New application offers greater agility and improves decision making by easing ability to connect production applications with higher-level business systems
Rockwell Automation today announced that it has extended the capabilities of its Rockwell Software industry solutions with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integration Gateway application. The application allows plants to more easily and cost-effectively exchange transactions and execute business processes across plant-floor and business systems, in real-time. This exchange is a critical component in achieving demand-driven, agile manufacturing and the ability to deliver a perfect order.
The robust and expandable architecture of the ERP Integration Gateway allows for exchange of common types of information required for agile manufacturing, such as quality, order planning and scheduling, as well as accounting of production costs and material usage. The ability to exchange quality information between manufacturing and business systems provides a number of benefits, including fewer deviations and exceptions, lower cost of quality and compliance, and faster release of finished goods, which helps improve customer satisfaction. The integration of order planning and scheduling also helps manufacturers improve on-time delivery, supply chain efficiencies, and resource utilization, and it gives the ability to more quickly respond to changing business demands. Integrating accounting of production costs and material usage can help reduce cycle time and inventories, and can provide a more accurate accounting of product and production costs.
“Companies operating an agile, compliant and cost-effective operations environment can potentially halve manufacturing costs in five years, but investments must be aligned and prioritized against these business requirements to move forward,” write Simon Jacobson and Roddy Martin of Gartner in a 2009 research note they co-authored on manufacturing execution systems*. “Progressive companies see manufacturing IT investments as part of this transformation.”
The ERP Integration Gateway is delivered on the Rockwell Software manufacturing services bus, a key component of the Rockwell Software manufacturing operations platform. The manufacturing services bus provides a proven service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework for messaging between applications that is secure, robust, scalable and highly available. The manufacturing services bus supports all of the common enterprise integration patterns and more than 30 different transport technologies, allowing for deployment into any existing IT environment with minimal disruption. The message bus architecture and flexibility helps provide a maximum return on existing IT investments, simplifies integration projects and eliminates dependencies between systems.
“Manufacturers have the opportunity to significantly reduce total cost of ownership with the Rockwell Software manufacturing operations platform by taking advantage of graphical data mapping capabilities, an integration framework and support from our experienced, global service teams,” said Keith Chambers, manufacturing operations platform business manager, Rockwell Automation.
The Rockwell Software manufacturing operations platform leverages existing IT skill sets and infrastructure to help reduce installation and maintenance costs. Graphical data mapping and the use of open, industry standard tools provide visual data transformation that requires no coding, allowing users to benefit from faster deployments, lower risk and reduced maintenance costs. Advantages of the integration framework include ease of support and the ability for repeatable deployment of standard functionality, which is easily extended to support customized ERP deployments. The experienced global service teams at Rockwell Automation have deep ERP integration domain knowledge, expertise and have established best practices. Teams utilize standard implementation methodologies with local resources.