 
Application vendors answer the call for packaged integration tools
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
As a young company in a fast-paced industry, Wave7 Optics signed up for a hosted product life-cycle management (PLM) service because it didn't have time for a lengthy system implementation. In taking the hosted option, however, Wave7 insisted that its service provider link its PLM application with Wave7's ERP system.
Wave7, based in Alpharetta, Ga., makes devices that convert optical signals to standard video, data, or voice signals before those signals travel the "last mile" into a home or business on high-speed communication networks.
"Our ERP system doesn't do a good job of managing engineering changes, which for us can occur up to twice a day," says Hans Hartmann, VP of operations for Wave7. "We wanted a PLM solution to process our engineering changes, and we needed a way to quickly transfer information about those changes to the item master list in our ERP system."
The item master list must be up-to-date to ensure that Wave7's customers are getting the latest version of a product whenever they place an order. Situations like this are forcing PLM vendors to build ways of linking their solutions to ERP systems.
"We offer various ERP integration options, including fully automated, turnkey integration or semi-automated integration," says Michael DeLapa, a VP with Arena Solutions, which hosts Wave7's PLM system. "The option used normally depends on the user's needs and their budget."
DeLapa says Wave7 paid for an Arena module that does turnkey integration between the Arena PLM system and Wave7's ERP package, which is the MFG/PRO suite from QAD.
Another vendor, PTC, included a similar module in the most recent release of its Windchill PLM package, and its story explains why users have waited so long for these out-of-the-box integration tools to surface. Robin Saitz, a VP at PTC, says it took roughly 18 months to develop this solution, which works with one specific version of the R/3 ERP suite from SAP.
Saitz says PTC made this first integration module compatible with SAP because the majority of its customers use that ERP system, but PTC plans solutions that work with other ERP packages because the problem of integrating PLM and ERP is a major industry issue.
"The fact is, different activities take place with PLM and ERP systems," Saitz explains, "but there is a great need for those systems to share data. Typically, this data transfer has taken place through a manual process or some homegrown, point-to-point method of integration that is expensive and time-consuming."
Saitz says the PTC solution pulls product data out of the Windchill vault and passes it to a message bus that PTC built with the help of TIBCO, a company that specializes in enterprise integration tools. The message bus sends the data to the SAP suite and a message goes back to Windchill, confirming the transfer and telling users exactly where they can find that data in the future.
The Arena solution includes a feature that, in effect, allows the QAD system to poll the PLM system every 20 minutes for any product changes. Hartmann says that feature helps Wave7 keep its network of subcontractors updated on all product changes.
"Twenty minutes after our change board approves a change, it's in the ERP system," Hartmann says. "So when one of our subcontractors looks up an order and sees the revision number is different than it was the last time they built that product, they can go into the PLM system and get details about the change. We don't have to e-mail or FTP files. Everything is there in real time."
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