VP Buildings fabricates better inventorymanagement with SOA
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
When Memphis, Tenn.-based VP Buildings looked to solve a nagging inventory management problem, it discovered one of the many benefits associated with a service-oriented architecture (SOA): fast, low-cost integration of disparate applications.
SOA is a technology infrastructure in which software applications have been broken into modular components—called services—and placed in a repository where they can be easily accessed either by users or other services. When this is done properly, a company can implement new business processes almost at will by writing procedures that call for specific sets of services to interact with one another.
VP Buildings used the SOA model to connect an automated shop-floor data-collection system with its PeopleSoft ERP suite—a link that generates real-time inventory updates.
"The shop floor not only sees when it consumes inventory, but we can show them the quantity available so they know what material is available, real time, on the floor," says Alan Anderson, director of application development for the manufacturer.
VP Buildings makes steel structures for low-rise manufacturing, warehousing, schools, and commercial applications. Before its SOA-based integration project, shop-floor operators indicated what material they used during production on paper forms that were passed to an inventory clerk. The clerk entered the data via a Web-based interface into the PeopleSoft system, hosted by an application service provider (ASP).
It could take up to three days after the inventory had been consumed before that information was available throughout the enterprise.
"We were having the problems you would expect," explains Anderson. "We would consume the inventory during the day and purchasing wouldn't even know about it. The next day we'd be out of material and wouldn't even know it."
To solve this problem, the company decided to create a custom interface for its inventory system that would allow workers to use existing bar-code technology on the shop floor to track inventory as it was being consumed. Anderson initially was prepared to connect the interface with the PeopleSoft inventory module "the old classic way, where we'd write the information to a table and [the ASP] would read the table and load it into PeopleSoft."
But when the estimates for developing and maintaining that connection proved too high, VP Buildings decided on another approach. After developing the interface screens, Anderson and his team used a set of tools from iWay Software, which offers enterprise application integration solutions, to expose the custom program components as Web services that could be called upon to automatically transfer data collected on the shop floor into the appropriate PeopleSoft modules.
The interface that accepts data from the bar-code system resides on a Microsoft Windows XP-based desktop machine, while the iWay software resides on a Dell rack server running Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
Using SOA has done more than speed up a single integration project: It gave VP Buildings a platform for making any application components available as services that can be used—and reused—to continually create new business processes.
"It will give us access to more capabilities inside of PeopleSoft," says Anderson, who already is contemplating new SOA-based processes. He expects to soon deploy the iWay tools to streamline the process of passing information between the company's order-entry system—written in Microsoft. NET—with the PeopleSoft inventory and financials modules.
John Senor, president of iWay Software, says the VP Buildings project follows the vision iWay had in making its application integration tools SOA-compatible. "Our objective," he says, "is to eliminate the need to write custom code at any point of integration."
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