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October 19, 1998

The ERP-To-ERP Connection

Software links disparate enterprise resource planning systems

By Richard Adhikari

oftware tools are letting companies link their enterprise resource planning systems with those of their business partners to speed the delivery of goods and services.

The U.S. unit of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., for instance, lets customers such as Intel, Motorola, and Adaptec access its order management system through their ERP systems, to help them monitor the manufacture of integrated circuits at TSMC's foundaries.

Monty Botkin, director of North American operations at the TSMC unit, in San Jose, Calif., selected CrossRoute Alliance, an application integration suite from CrossRoute Software Inc., to tie TSMC's order-management system directly to clients' ERP systems. It took TSMC nine weeks to link its system to Adaptec's SAP R/3 system. The result: Data transmitted faster, the production cycle time sped up, and TSMC found itself able to send data to Adaptec in a format suitable to Adaptec's staff.

Results like this are leading businesses to link their ERP systems to those of their business partners, creating an electronic value chain. ERP systems integrate all manufacturing and related applications at the back end, from manufacturing scheduling to billing and ordering. Tools that let companies establish ERP-to-ERP links are application integration suites, electronic-commerce systems, and middleware. Some ERP vendors will create custom links between their product and others at a customer's request; alternatively, users can use development tools to create their own links.

CrossWorlds Software Inc. offers the United Applications Architecture, a suite of applications that integrates ERP and other packages from various vendors. This is crucial because companies have multiple views of each customer. The billing department, for example, will list the client's purchasing manager as the customer, while the shipping department will list the client's receiving department as the customer. Until those views are integrated, the manufacturing and selling processes will be awkward. "If you take six seconds to manufacture a product but six weeks to ship it, the process breaks down," says CrossWorlds chief technology officer Prashant Gupta.

UAA will provide one unified view of a customer across all applications. This will be based on predefined views of customers, roles and business processes, and their interactions. CrossWorlds lists 10 defined roles of customers, such as billing and shipping, specifies a set of formalized relationships between those roles, and uses algorithms to work out which relationships apply between which roles for a particular customer. UAA also includes 22 defined business processes, such as human resources and customer support, and ties them into customer information so that the applications within a company will be able to access information from each other in near real time when doing business. Links to systems outside the corporate wall will be provided through UAA's electronic-commerce module.

Focus On Processes
While CrossWorlds focuses on internal integration, CrossRoute ties business processes across corporate walls. Business partners must agree on the specific processes for conducting a business activity, such as procurement, and work out shared processes for this. CrossRoute Alliance breaks processes into two components: one public, consisting of the shared processes, and the other private, covering the way each company conducts business internally. This lets individual companies run internal processes as usual, while linking to business partners' ERP systems. CrossRoute Alliance uses adapters to connect to different applications, using the Internet and other types of networks.

Another approach to linking ERP systems across corporate walls is the network-centric focus taken by Active Software Inc. Its product, Integration System, consists of adapters, agents, information brokers, and graphical user interface tools that act as one network. Think of Integration System as simultaneous translation linked to a central dispatch system. The information broker is the dispatch, the central control, and storage point. Incoming information is translated by the adapters, or simultaneous translators, into Information System events and sent to the broker, which automatically queues, filters, and routes events and guarantees delivery.

Outgoing events are sent by the broker to the adapters, which translate them into the receiving application's native format and send them out. Agents monitor events and apply business rules that may trigger new events. Say a business gets an order that's too large to handle. The agent in the Integration System application triggers a business rule that tells the system to fulfill half the order now and the rest an hour later. These events and resources are defined for the information broker by developers using Active's integration tools. Users employ Active's management tools to configure, manage, and monitor activities in Integration System.

Because information is routed through the information broker rather than going directly between different systems, it's easy to connect disparate systems. For example, Marshall Industries, the $1.2 billion electronic-components distributor in El Monte, Calif., has built an enterprise model based on Integration System that handles more than 800,000 transactions worldwide daily. Marshall sells about 178,000 items from about 100 suppliers to more than 65,000 customers globally. Customers' ERP systems can access Marshall's system using any means of communication--fax, EDI, Internet, E-mail, or the telephone. CEO Rob Rodin says Marshall needed to build a system that could handle information coming in any format because "we're a junction box in a supply chain and don't have a lot of leverage." Active's adapters offer him that flexibility in links he requires.

Download a table of products that can be adapted to integrate applications from disparate ERP systems as a PDF file.

To view a PDF file, download the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

As use of the Web proliferates, E-commerce products are being offered as a means of linking ERP systems across corporate walls. Candle Corp. recently unveiled the Roma Business Services Platform Version 1.1, an enterprise computing platform that ties together component, message queuing, and Light Directory Access Protocol technologies. It will support E-commerce applications as well as application connectivity and application integration. The Roma BSP is part of a suite of products that will include an application development environment, integration facilities, a systems manager, and a module providing messaging application connection to Swift, a service that provides secure messaging to more than 6,000 financial institutions worldwide. This suite will use a Java-based interface to tie reusable components together into a business service that can be called by multiple client applications. This business service will invoke a chain of components that will be able to execute across different platforms, operating systems, companies, and geographical areas. Roma provides adapters for various legacy and client-server systems and applications.