Linking the golden oldies

Adjust font size:

Magazine Article, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : IT in manufacturing
Published : July 2004

There’s a lot of know-how in legacy systems. Annie Gregory finds out how
manufacturers are linking their installed IT to give it a new lease of life

I t takes money, not to mention courage, to rip out all your IT and replace it with one all-encompassing system. Companies obviously still do it – there’s no sign of SAP or Oracle going bust – but it’s not something to be taken on lightly. People tend to make the big move to gain the famous ‘one view of the entire enterprise’. The same end-to-end IT promises the demise of all those infuriating black holes between disparate systems that swallow up time and information and lead to bad decisions and poor performance. It’s a proposition that has gained in strength as the big vendors push into areas like CAD and PDM (product data management) that have hitherto been the province of the specialists. And there is no doubt that many of the companies that have dumped the old in favour of the new have not regretted their decision.

In business as in life, however, there’s a lot to be said for maturity. Those despised legacy systems carry a lot of knowledge and history. What’s more, many vendors have invested a lot of development time in keeping their products up-to-date. As a result, some of these systems are capable of serving the company’s future direction, provided one obstacle can be overcome: legacy systems need to be able to link up with other repositories of company knowledge and also, in some cases, to tie in with suppliers’ and customers’ own systems.

WRQ, which builds software for accessing and integrating legacy applications, has recently surveyed manufacturers’ attitude to their old systems. The entire survey base regarded them as critical to their business and 86 per cent additionally saw them as crucial to customer service. Yet only a third of interviewees had integrated them with customer facing applications and nearly 50 per cent were planning to replace them at some point rather than trying the cheaper, less disruptive route.

They might do well to consider how some manufacturers have coped successfully with the issues of integration. First of all, how about using unexploited capabilities that may already be available to your existing system? Most of the established mid-range suppliers have proven interfaces to commonly used CAD products like AutoCad.

Then, take a look at the DIY approach. Most companies regard the prospect of ‘home-brewed’ extensions with total horror. It’s not their core competency and there is an understandable reluctance to import new skills to handle bespoke work. On the other hand, it could be the ingredient that puts one company ahead of its competitor.

What is more, it is easier than it used to be. Vendors used to guard their interfaces like a dog guards its dinner. But some companies, notably Syspro distributor Information Engineering (IEG), have shown commercial realism. It is encouraging customers to use its e.net technology to extend the functionality of their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems without corrupting the core software and damaging their upgrade path. Developers do, however, have to take a training programme and be accredited by Syspro.

Some customers have responded with alacrity. Hewland Engineering, inventor and manufacturer of the racing gearbox, is using e.net to link its specialist PDM system to Syspro. Currently, part numbers and bills of materials (BoMs) have to be manually created from data generated from PDM and mistakes are corrected by going back to the designer. The new programme allows the designer to create part numbers and BoMs directly from PDM as part of the normal design process.

Kaba (UK), which makes security doors, now has a live link between its proprietary estimating, quotation and order-processing package (written in Visual Basic) and its ERP system. Previously information passed via batch transfer to the sales invoices and customer master file. Kaba’s developers integrated the two after a one-day e.net course at IEG. It is cutting at least two days a month off IT work and it is now being used to also provide credit status in real-time to the front-end package. And, after a similar training course, ITW Signode’s IT manager in Germany wrote a web-based service engineer’s system. Currently, field engineers of this international packaging manufacturer raise orders and invoices for spares and labour on customers’ sites but have to synchronise their laptops with ERP back at base. Now they will be able to dial via their mobile phones onto the VPN (virtual private network), raise the relevant documentation, check and update the engineers’ stock holding and pick up their call status. Syspro is updated in real-time. The new programme is being rolled out to 150 engineers across Europe.

The next option is to let your vendor take the strain. Suppose you need system-to-system data transfer with your customer or suppliers. You can go through the complexities or EDI or XML connections via hosted platforms or private exchanges. But sometimes there are much simpler, more cost-effective ways.

Take USC Europe, for example, whose Guy Middleton said: “We’re spending £250,000 a year paying people to manage our end of the bridge between us and our customers,” he said. “That’s redundant, non-value adding work, and it’s very dull.” He pointed out that sending and receiving information via the internet is not, in itself, going to deliver dramatic improvements in business performance unless that information is automatically linked to your own systems. Instead, he argued, companies need to stitch their IT applications together directly, so they can exchange information, orders, schedules and the like, without any human input.

Since 85 per cent of USC’s UK business is done with three customers with stable, effective ERP systems, there was a prime opportunity for automation. These customers have outsourced their goods inwards operations, at the same time moving to a consignment stocking model in which USC delivers product in bulk to a hub warehouse. Whereas USC was accustomed to dealing with small numbers of movements of large quantities of stock, the shift to call-off means that it now faced many more transactions. So USC and SSI developed an application to application (A2A) integration scheme using Microsoft’s BizTalk e-Business. When the customer calls stock from the hub warehouse, it triggers an email including an attachment which contains the details of the transaction. SSI’s technical staff have developed a module to watch for the arrival of such messages, and to format the data for BizTalk to place it directly on USC’s TROPOS system. Only in the event of exceptions or errors will USC staff need to be involved in the process. This module can be applied to any similar B2B transaction environment, or any ERP system.

It must be admitted that these are all ways of dealing with highly specific issues, although the solutions are applicable to other companies. But what if your problem goes wider? Not one pensioner but seven, all refusing to talk to each other. It’s probably time to call in the specialists, which is what 4000 strong Swedish logistics company Schenker AB did. A lack of front-to-back systems integration meant long caller wait times, a lost-call rate of 20 per cent and high employee turnover.

Each week the customer service group handles approximately 25,000 calls. The most frequent is: ‘When will my shipment arrive?’. Before the new portal-based solution, which is based on WRQ Verastream’s integration software, even the simplest question could take an average of over two minutes to answer. Customer service reps (CSRs) often had to retrieve 30 discrete pieces of information – including contact, price, and invoice data – from applications on multiple systems. Sometimes, when accessing one system, CSRs would be timed-out of another, forcing them to start over again. It’s a larger scale version of the problems afflicting many manufacturers.

“The business goal was to rebuild both customer and employee satisfaction by cutting CSR response time,” said Ulf Pettersson, IT project manager at Schenker. “The technology goal was to replace our obsolete system without jeopardizing mission-critical information.”

Schenker IT first considered the ‘buy young’ approach of a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. But the portal solution was not only much cheaper but would allow access to seven applications, some homegrown, on disparate AS/400, OS/390, UNIX, and NT systems. Verastream allows terminal-based host applications to dynamically exchange information with any other enterprise system, including web applications. It works by identifying business functions and data on enterprise systems and presenting them as interchangeable components. By combining the components, developers can build new applications without data replication or rewriting of code on the underlying systems. CSRs can now answer customers simply by entering the external shipment identifier instead of querying each system individually. Within six months, productivity was up and customer protests were down, and training time and costs had been cut, too.

Here are three different approaches to a perennial problem. Integrating disparate systems is never going to be easy. But nor is ripping out all your technology, trying to run your business during a massive new implementation and taking the hit on the bottom-line. It’s certainly worth seeing if your tried and true systems have more useful work in them before putting them out to grass.

Comments on this story

click here to add a comment

You must be registered & logged in to add comments
Please register

already have an account and just want to login?

email address
password
remember me