Overview
This company is a division of the world leader in the production of synthetic fibers and textiles, carbon fibers, plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and high performance films. Their parent company operates 127 facilities in 18 countries around the world with over 32,000 employees worldwide and annual sales in excess of $13 billion, USD.
This division, based on the East Coast of the US, is responsible for manufacturing oriented polyester and polypropylene films marketed to the magnetic tape, food packaging, capacitor and industrial markets.
The Challenge
The company needed a cost-effective method to integrate their newly purchased Manufacturing Execution System (MES), their existing Trim Optimization and Advanced Planning systems and their bar code scanners with SAP. They wanted a solution that could support a wide variety of sophisticated real-time SAP interfaces and that they could build and extend themselves. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), ease of use, flexibility and time to implement were all critical factors in the decision-making process along with a requirement for comprehensive support from their vendor of choice.
The Solution
The use of NLINK® provided significant advantages over alternative approaches. Junot Systems professional services group built the first MES to SAP interfaces and delivered them to the customer. They then provided on-site customized training using the SAP interfaces they had just built. From that point onwards, the customer’s IT group and their chosen systems integrator built all of the additional interfaces that were put into production. Junot Systems professional services group played a consultative and QA role in the first few weeks in order to make sure that the lessons learned during formal training were properly put into practice.
SAP Interfaces
The customer identified 16 initial SAP interfaces between the MES and their SAP Enterprise 4.7 system:
- Download Material Master from SAP
- Download Bills of Materials (BOMs) from SAP
- Download Routings from SAP
- Download Production Resource Tools (PRTs) from SAP
- Download Work Centers from SAP
- Download Planned Orders from SAP
- Download Production Orders from SAP
- Download Inspection Plans from SAP
- Upload Production Confirmation to SAP
- Upload Production Consumption to SAP
- Upload Production Order Status to SAP
- Upload Time Confirmations to SAP
- Upload Goods Movement – Receipts/Issues to SAP
- Synchronize Inventory – Goods Movement to SAP
- Upload Testing Results to SAP
- Upload Inspection Results to SAP
The customer also needed to interface their barcode scanners to the MES and to SAP in order to more efficiently manage the handling of finished goods to inventory.
NLINK Components
The following NLINK components were deployed at this customer site:
- NLINK Server
- NLINK SAP Connector
- NLINK SQL Extender
- NLINK Flat File Extender
- NLINK ADC (Bar Coding) Extender
- NLINK Configuration Module
- NLINK Management Module
- NLINK Alert Module
Benefits
Junot Professional Services provided the initial NLINK training and then played an ongoing QA role throughout the project to ensure adherence to standards and to promote the reusability of configuration components. In addition, we leveraged our established Professional Services infrastructure and configuration methodology to ease the learning curve and maintain an exceptionally high standard for the deployed solution.
NLINK is now being used as an integration toolkit by the customer’s own in-house IT personnel to meet their specific integration needs. NLINK was selected in direct competition with SAP’s MII product. Since the initial sale, NLINK was subsequently chosen to also provide Bar Code scanner to SAP integration, Salesforce integration, SCADA integration and more. The developed solution has been successfully rolled-out to additional sites replicating the success of the original deployment.
The net result is that the customer got a powerful and flexible SAP integration solution at a fraction of the cost of other commercially available options.
