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Home > Manufacturing ERP News > SOA begins with BPM at high tech manufacturer |
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Until last July, semiconductor testing manufacturer FormFactor Inc. was doing integration the old fashioned way, hand typing information from a legacy manufacturing execution system and then copying the data into the ERP system.
Then the cutting edge technology company decided to chuck the archaic double-entry method and pursue a service-oriented architecture project. Nilay Banker, senior director of IT and business process engineering at FormFactor, doesn't have ROI numbers yet for the Web services integration of those two systems, but it is saving three workers from the boring job of copying all that data by hand. It was also the first step in a business process management (BPM) driven SOA implementation at the high tech manufacturer, he explained. "BPM and SOA go hand-in-hand," Banker said of the approach being used at FormFactor, which designs and manufactures probe cards used by semiconductor manufacturers to electrically test integrated circuits. "We are adopting an approach where we first start with BPM and then leverage SOA technology." A project starts with the business process and SOA becomes the enabler for automating it, Banker said. Integrating the legacy manufacturing execution system into the ERP system was a classic case of automating a manual business process, but it also had a strong business productivity driver, he said. "As our volume grew and the complexity of manufacturing increased it became non-scaleable," he said of the manual keying of data that was the only link between the systems. The manufacturing of probe cards, which used by semiconductor makers to test integrated circuit designs, is a complex process because each lot of cards is unique requiring a variety of manufacturing methods, Banker said. The cards must not only meet the exact specifications of the customer, but also meet delivery deadlines in the fast-paced business of producing new integrated circuits. So it is critical that the departments overseeing probe card manufacturing know if there are any problems in the process, which usually takes three weeks to complete finished cards. Has something been ruined so a new one must be started immediately? Has one been sent back for re-working? These questions could make or break a delivery schedule. A best of breed IT shop, FormFactor uses Oracle e-Business Suite as its ERP system, covering manufacturing planning, inventory management, shipping and receiving. It also includes a material requirements planning (MRP) system, Banker explained. The Oracle products were already Web services enabled, but the manufacturing system on the shop floor was not. The PROMIS manufacturing execution system (MES) from Brooks Software, which in November was acquired by Applied Materials Inc., was originally developed in the 1970s when Fortran was in flower. All manufacturing execution, routing, instructions to the workers on the factory floor, are managed by MES. But that data was urgently needed by the MRP system that drives the planning process. The MES data was so crucial it was worth the time of those three workers who came in around 3 a.m. to manually copy it over so the MRP system would have it when the workday began. Prior to last year, integrating the two systems would have been hardwired, point-to-point, Banker said. But last year, FormFactor's IT and business organizations decided to try doing it with Web services as a first step to building an SOA infrastructure. "We realized that to achieve flexibility we had to adopt a service-oriented architecture approach," he said. While the MES system pre-dated XML, Banker's development team found that it had an operational data store (ODS) where data on events, such as shop floor delays, were sent. This was the information the MRP system needed to provide alerts on problems to managers overseeing the manufacturing process. "So what we did was we built our own Web services adapter using triggers on the operational data store," he explained. "So looking at the data that was generated in the operational data store we figured out the events that are triggering the data to be pushed to the ODS and based on those events, we developed Web services." Building the Web services for the legacy data in the ODS took about two months, he said, and the entire project took eight months. Since it went live this past July, the legacy data generated due to problems by the MES on the shop floor become alerts for the managers, so decisions can be made and actions taken to get the probe cards manufactured and delivered on time. This first project laid the foundation for BPM driven SOA, Banker said. He plans further SOA integration projects in the next 12 months to integrate CRM with ERP and Product Data Management with MES. "That is when we will truly have a service-oriented architecture with a business services repository and be leveraging the true power of SOA," he said.
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