Achieving Industrial-Strength SOA

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October 25, 2006

Achieving Industrial-Strength SOA

Clearly, there's something for every industry in service-oriented architecture. However, financial services and telecommunications -- which have products and services heavily wrapped up in information technology -- have been leading the way in SOA, as they have in most other integration intiatives in years gone by.

While manufacturing tends to be a bit more conservative, its likely to be much more demanding of SOA when it does arrive. While enterprise SOA can be achieved with fairly wide margins for error or lower levels of availability, manufacturing SOA must be ironclad and industrial-strength. Fortunately, many of the ingredients needed for manufacturing SOA are already in place.

Colin Masson, Alison Smith, Dennis Gaughan of AMR Research recently put together an analysis of the special challenges involved in developing SOA within the manufacturing sector. "Manufacturing SOA requires much higher fidelity services, event definition and monitoring, and deterministic orchestration of services, or execution of triggered and scheduled workflows," they wrote.

A copy of the full report is available to registered ebizQ members here.

The time is ripe for SOA in the manufacturing space, AMR Research analysts believe. Here's why:

Pent-up demand for new software. AMR Research's latest survey of 900 companies finds that after years of under-investment, manufacturing operations investments are the number-one priority for enterprises this year, ahead of ERP systems. "Almost two-thirds of the manufacturing investment will be on in-house custom applications development, or the extensive customization of various manufacturing applications," the analysts write. "It’s a market ripe for efficient development of composite applications and service providers."

Manufacturers were using "composite applications" long before SOA. There is no single dominant model for manufacturing software, and solutions are highly fragmented, the analysts say. "Building composite applications was a necessity in manufacturing before the invention of the SOA acronym, and manufacturing is positioned to be the first demonstrable beneficiary of broad SOA adoption," they observe. "A large manufacturing company may operate a fleet of 40 or more plants, many of which acquired through mergers, and the software application landscape within each plant is likely to be dramatically different. This complexity has been, and will continue to be, a major driving force for vendor adoption of SOA in the manufacturing operations arena."

"Higher fidelity" is required for manufacturing systems than what is currently available. "Enterprise SOA, BPM, and BAM architectural thinking is firmly grounded in the "low-fidelity" world of business systems," the analysts state. Manufacturing SOA will need to leverage existing manufacturing services to meet the pressing demands of real-time production and supply chain management. To succeed, manufacturing SOA will need a manufacturing services definition and repository, real-time event definition and monitoring, real-time operations process management, and real-time operations intelligence. The current crop of business intelligence and data mining tools are geared to "low-level uptime/downtime" associated with data warehouses, the analysts say.

The analysts urge, however, that manufacturing SOA not be implemented in a vacuum. "Manufacturing SOA, while having unique requirements and a compelling business case, must not be delivered in isolation to the broader enterprise SOA," they write. "Companies must look to define enterprise architectures that encompass both plant-level and enterprise systems. To ensure this, manufacturing must be well represented on the enterprise architecture team."

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us