Enterprise integration as business strategy

Running a business on a single enterprise software platform is a logical goal. Companies have reported lowering systems maintenance costs as much as 60 percent by simply reducing the number of ERP systems running at various business units.

Yet companies still are finding it difficult—if not impossible—to find a single enterprise system that meets all of their business needs. That fact is keeping suppliers of enterprise application integration (EAI) platforms in business, while also causing ERP vendors to continue enhancing their own integration capabilities.

The story of Pilgrim's Pride, North America's second-largest producer of processed poultry products, is a prime example of the difficulties manufacturers face in trying to consolidate enterprise software suites, and of how vendors are responding to these issues.

When Pittsburg, Texas-based Pilgrim's Pride acquired the chicken-processing operations of ConAgra Foods in 2003, it inherited 17 plants running five shop-floor control systems. Pilgrim's Pride already had three shop-floor systems of its own, and now all eight had to be linked to a central SAP ERP suite.

In an ideal world, Pilgrim's Pride would simply run all of its shop-floor operations on SAP, eliminating the need for systems integration. In the real world, however, that wasn't practical.

"It is possible to use SAP on the shop floor, but there are a couple of reasons why we don't," explains Shawn Collenburg, senior integration architect at Pilgrim's Pride. "First, we don't want all of our plants dependent on the SAP system always being up and running. We want the ability to run individual plants even if the central system is down. Second, a lot of operational data generated at the plant level consists of details that are not of great concern to people outside of the plants. Storing those details in separate systems prevents us from overloading our central database."

Pilgrim's Pride already has embarked on a plan for consolidating to a single, homegrown shop-floor system, but Collenburg says it will be several years before all plants are on that system. In the meantime, Pilgrim's Pride will continue relying on the Business Integration Server (BIS), an EAI and business-process management platform from Seeburger, to bridge the gaps between SAP and the multiple shop-floor systems.

Actually, Collenburg says, Seeburger BIS will remain in place after the shop-floor system consolidation, but its job should be much easier because it will only have to broker data between two systems.

"Right now, we have four shop-floor systems, and having such a heterogeneous environment is a support nightmare," Collenburg says, "particularly because the vendors are no longer supporting two of those systems. That exposes us to great risk. It's difficult to make changes to existing processes, and when we start looking at adding technology like RFID, there is no way those systems can handle that."

Seeburger positions the BIS as "capable of integrating 100 percent of an organization's applications and trading partners—including smaller customers and suppliers that still do business on paper."

Collenburg says that claim has proven true for Pilgrim's Pride. "The Seeburger platform is the glue between our two environments," he declares. "It works because it's much more flexible than either SAP or our shop-floor systems."

That flexibility stems from myriad components contained in BIS, including standard adapters for connecting with widely used ERP, CRM, and SCM applications, as well as tools for developing and implementing business processes that incorporate newer technology such as RFID and Web services.

Seeburger BIS is one of several EAI platforms currently on the market that can support a company's efforts to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA is a technology infrastructure in which software applications are 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.

One reason IT professionals find the SOA concept appealing is that it allows for creating new business processes without necessarily having to buy new applications. "It's already getting harder to get more value by purchasing additional applications," notes Collenburg. "Getting more from your IT investment requires expanding the scope—and the sources—of information that you can process and analyze at a given time. I would like to blur the lines between applications as much as possible by making them easy to integrate."

A number of vendors that started out offering tools solely for integrating applications have since developed platforms that support building SOAs. For instance, webMethods, a pioneer in the EAI space, calls its Fabric technology suite "the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and business process management . . . allowing companies to dramatically improve business process productivity while leveraging existing IT assets."

Because the concept is still fairly new, most SOA implementations encompass small-scale projects that blend a few software components to execute a particular business process, such as checking a customer's credit status when they place an order. But Sonic Softwaresays the newest version of its Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), released in March, will allow companies to tackle much larger SOA projects.

"We consider this the third generation of ESB technology, Dave Chappel, Sonic Software's chief technology evangelist, says of the new release, which contains a "distributing debugging" feature for which Sonic is seeking a patent.

According to Chappel, this technology can accelerate—and expand—the deployment of an SOA by allowing IT professionals to test and correct problems in business processes after they have been deployed across an enterprise.

In February, Epicor Software joined the ranks of ERP vendors offering platforms that make it easier for customers to link applications from their ERP suites to an SOA. James Norwood, Epicor's VP of product marketing, describes this platform, called Service Connect, as "a Web services-based business-integration platform that functions as the central integration point for implementing secure workflow orchestrations within Epicor applications, and with third-party applications to enhance collaboration and automate business processes.

"It clearly demonstrates the business value of service-orientation within enterprise application software," Norwood adds, "by providing a straightforward workflow orchestration tool that improves collaboration, the speed at which information moves, and ultimately value-chain performance."

While Epicor targets medium-size companies, SAP and Oracle, the two primary ERP vendors targeting large enterprises, have their own platforms for supporting SOA deployments.

Collenburg says the most valuable feature of Seeburger BIS is its ability to orchestrate processes involving an unlimited numbers of systems. "I can solve any system interconnection problem with this platform," he says. "If the data exists on our network, I can present it in whatever format the receiving system requires."

Just as important, Collenburg says, making those connections is a relatively simple task. The first step in linking two systems is creating an interface flow diagram, showing which data needs to be transferred, and the path it needs to take. Then the formats in which each system accepts data must be identified.

The BIS can then be configured to translate any data passing through from its original format to the format required by the receiving system. Finally, the two communicating systems are given routing instructions telling them when and where to send data.

Typically, the systems think they are sending data to another application, but they actually are sending it to BIS, which translates the data before sending it to the appropriate receiving application.

Pilgrim's Pride order-entry process illustrates how this works. Orders are accepted by phone, fax, or EDI. Collenburg estimates that half of those orders must be checked for potential errors by a customer service rep before going into the SAP order-entry module.

When the SAP system executes a command to send orders to the shop floor, Seeburger BIS takes over, translating each order from SAP format to one that can be understood by the shop-floor system the order is being sent to.

When orders are fulfilled, the shop floor system sends an order confirmation back to SAP, which first must be translated by BIS. The shop-floor systems also send other manufacturing-related data—such as lists of materials transferred between plants, and shipping information—back to SAP, all of which is first translated by BIS.

Even while anticipating the move to a single shop-floor system, Collenburg doesn't expect Pilgrim's Pride's need for an integration platform to decrease.

"Actually, we are getting to the point where systems integration is going to become even more critical," he says. "I want to be able to analyze data from anywhere in the enterprise at the executive level. Some of that can be done through data warehousing and business intelligence tools, but it would be much easier if we could simply combine data from our ERP and shop-floor system [without taking the intermediate step of building a data warehouse]."

Ultimately, Collenburg sees Pilgrim's Pride building its own SOA. "The goal is to have everything connected to a services framework, where systems can be linked to serve either operational or analytical purposes as needed."