Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« Making SOA More Eventful | Main | SOA Success, One Integration Project at a Time » March 01, 2007SOA Threatens a Quaint 20th Century Practice -- Double Data Entry One might think a high-tech manufacturing operation would be light years ahead of your average business in terms of service orienting applications. But even the techiest of the high techiest firms are still run on behemoth ERP systems that tend to lock more data away than share it. As SearchWebServices' Rich Seeley describes it, semiconductor testing manufacturer FormFactor Inc. "was How quaint. A touch of life as it was back in the 20th century. Well, actually, there's still a lot of this manual process going on in the 21st as well. And that will be the subject of future blog posts. The company didn't just decide to drop an SOA into the middle of this configuration. Rather, the company's IT director took a hard look at its business process management before seeing where SOA would fit. SOA would become the enabler for business process automation. "BPM and SOA go hand-in-hand," Nilay Banker, senior director of IT and business process engineering at FormFactor, is quoted as saying. "We are adopting an approach where we first start with BPM and then leverage SOA technology." THe company relied on two systems -- a legacy manufacturing execution system originally built back in the 1970s, and a more recent Oracle E-Business ERP system. Data from the MES system had to be manually rekeyed into the Oracle system. Banker's team went about the project by building Web services interfaces into the legacy MES system's operational data store. Data coming out of the MES system -- which tracks shop floor production issues -- can now be made available to decision makers on a real-time basis. No more waiting until the next day, after production data has been manually rekeyed into the Oracle system. There's plenty of debate going on about the value of SOA, but what FormFactor is achieving after a few months' work -- eliminating manual rekeying -- is perhaps the most fundamental benefit SOA is delivering. Right away, there is documentable time being saved in clerical or operator salaries, as well as faster access to data. The "business agility" aspect that is promised by SOA may be difficult to grasp and measure, but here's an example of hard savings and highly tangible benefits. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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