InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

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The Integrated Enterprise

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ERP projects also fuel application-integration efforts. Many companies have replaced or augmented legacy applications with ERP systems. Once the ERP system is in place, the next step tends to be the integration of the ERP app with other strategic business applications.

Office furniture supplier Herman Miller Inc. wants to link its Baan ERP manufacturing system with its production and order-processing applications. The latter are IBM host-based CICS applications. No such link currently exists and data must be manually re-entered on the mainframe system, says IT director Rex Kiekintveld.

The Zeeland, Mich., company plans to use Active Software Inc.'s ActiveWorks middleware to make the connection. "We'll be eliminating that dual, manual maintenance of the systems," Kiekintveld says. That, in turn, will speed order processing and make Herman Miller more responsive to its customers, he says.

ActiveWorks is a message-brokering system that routes and queues messages among applications, databases, and other systems. The ActiveWorks software includes adapters to connect with a wide range of packaged applications, relational databases, and mainframe software.

Herman Miller intends to move off its mainframe eventually and install server-based planning, scheduling, and transportation applications. The ActiveWorks software should make that task easier, says Kiekintveld. "The middleware will provide plug-and-play interfaces to the applications," he says.

Streamlined Processes
Because application integration can link ERP and logistics applications, it can be used to streamline inventory movement and provide more-accurate inventory information. When vitamin maker Murdock Madaus Schwabe replaced its legacy ERP application with SAP R/3, it also needed to integrate the package with Catalyst WMS, a warehouse-management system from Catalyst International Inc. While SAP tracks product demand and informs customer-service representatives about available inventory, Catalyst is the system used to move goods around and keep tabs on the inventory and its readiness for shipping.

The Springville, Utah, company is a subsidiary of Nature's Way Products, which had an early run-in with customized integration. That project "almost put the company out of business because we weren't able to process orders," says director of IS Bill Waters. Customer interfaces required extensive maintenance and didn't map tightly enough to Catalyst to push frequent inventory updates through them, he says. Inventory counts were updated only at night, and if there were errors in transmission, it created a ripple effect that threw off inventory for the rest of the day. Customer-service representatives couldn't see what the company actually had in stock, he says.

Nature's Way and its subsidiary implemented Oberon Software Inc.'s Prospero, which consists of "building blocks" that contain a company's business rules and interfaces to the applications being linked. Prospero let Nature's Way build interfaces that map closely to R/3 and Catalyst. The interfaces can be easily updated when the applications are modified. Now, inventory can be updated every 15 minutes, with 99.5% accuracy, dropping the number of out-of-stock situations to almost zero. And customer-service representatives are able to push orders through more quickly.

Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., a Johnston, Iowa, seed and agricultural research company, moved to R/3 to make its business more flexible. The seed company, which was acquired by DuPont Co. last month, also wanted to be able to link with suppliers more easily, says Gary Clinch, a project leader on Pioneer's interapplication technologies and electronic-commerce team.

Pioneer is deploying R/3 in phases due to limited IT resources. That left a legacy sales and distribution application that needed to work with the new SAP modules. The company used a combination of IBM's MQSeries, which handles messaging between the applications, and TSI Software Inc.'s Mercator, which converts legacy data into a form that SAP can use. That helped the company keep its business running while it phases in the rest of R/3. "Being able to build those application bridges buys you time," Clinch says.