Enterprising connection: Oracle offers PLM users out-the-box integration to SAP ERP
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/7/2009 12:00:00 AM
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Users of the Oracle Agile Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) software package now have a ready-made solution for connecting to the SAP ERP suite.
Oracle unveiled this solution—dubbed the Oracle Agile PLM Design-to-Release Process Integration Pack (PIP)—on April 6.
On the same day, Oracle announced integration packs for creating links to move data from the Oracle Customer and Product Data Hubs to the Siebel CRM and Oracle E-Business Suites.
In providing the PLM Design-to-Release integration pack, Oracle is acknowledging that many users of the Oracle Agile PLM suite use SAP for ERP. A large percentage of those users adopted SAP before Oracle acquired the company that developed the Agile PLM package.
“For years, Agile PLM customers have benefited by leveraging integrations with SAP,” Oracle said in a press release announcing the new integration pack. “This latest standards-based integration will give customers even more flexibility to adapt to changing business environments.”
Oracle claims the new integration pack will deliver “seamless synchronization of product content among distributed engineering and manufacturing organizations and the extended product network.”
The integration pack, built on top of the Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA), was codeveloped with IT services firm Sierra Atlantic.
“Customers are looking for pre-built products that can be easily configured and extended to work seamlessly with technology investments today, as well as support future plans and directions,” said GK Murthy, senior VP, enterprise solutions, Sierra Atlantic. “Our collaboration with Oracle enables us to marry implementation expertise with Oracle’s industry-leading applications to deliver greater value to our customers.”
According to Oracle, the integration pack offers the following benefits:
• Next-generation composite process and solution capabilities that are configurable, extensible, and sustainable—allowing customers to leverage current and future systems investments;
• Pre-built, open standards-based and complete “design-to-release” flow for new product releases;
• Seamless, cross-application execution of the change-management process releasing product design updates to manufacturing;
• Configurable, extensible, bidirectional synchronization of engineering and supply chain information between PLM and manufacturing for greater visibility—without the need for recoding, and with protection of changes across upgrades;
• User-friendly configuration that allows both business and IT users to easily define and manage value maps for the key elements important to them;
• A robust process monitoring, error-handling, and configurable notification management framework to minimize impact on transfer process, product quality, cost, and time-to-market; and
• Lower total cost of ownership, as Agile PLM Design-to-Release PIP is designed, developed, maintained, owned, and sold by Oracle, avoiding the need and risk involved in third-party integrations.
Jose Lazares, Oracle VP of application development and product strategy for AIA, said the links forged with this integration pack will give manufacturers greater visibility into both product development and supply chain data, which “significantly improves time-to-market and time-to-volume metrics, enabling greater, sustainable, and more predictable product innovation.”
Lazares also said this is the first of many Oracle-to-SAP integration packs the company expects to develop.
