Plant floor systems come in a wide variety of flavors, and successfully connecting them to your SAP system can be a difficult, intimidating, expensive, and risky prospect that ultimately has the potential to deliver disappointing results.
From years of experience talking with CIOs and directors of IT supporting manufacturing, operations, and supply chain, a grim picture of SAP integration project has been painted.
A common criticism is that even though the overall system is pretty good, the integration was a custom-coding nightmare. Having to dedicate key programming resources to month-long projects spent punching single-use code ended up costing tens of thousands of dollars and put the company at risk if something happened to the person that developed the custom code.
In other situations, the project team was skilled with underlying protocols, data formats, and plant floor systems but depending on them to also become experts in the SAP development environment for integration was another story altogether. Staffing the integration project with the right skill sets can be a real problem and add higher project risk and increased the expense to the already complex implementation.
Sometimes, companies are left in the uncomfortable position of dependence on the outside consultants they hired to do the integration; not to mention the significant impact on their budget.
The customizations made during the integration have the potential to cause uncertainty when a SAP upgrade comes along, particularly if the original project team has either moved on or is dedicated to other tasks. The question, “What if the upgrade overwrites my customizations?”, is often heard.
There’s no doubt about it; the above statements are rooted in truth. Some SAP integrations have significant room for improvement.
The misconception lies in the idea that there are only a few ways to go about it. There are alternatives to hiring costly consultants, piling on valuable resources for months at a time, or going about it all on your own with a custom-coding venture. The question is, how can you successfully connect your plant floor systems in a reasonable timeframe, without hiring expensive SAP consultants, and without writing custom code or modifying your SAP system?
Plant floor systems come in a wide variety of flavors and successfully connecting them to your SAP system can be a difficult, intimidating, expensive and risky prospect that ultimately delivers disappointing results. This document is intended to shine a light on a few myths about SAP integrations and offer alternative approaches to alleviate the pain of the myths.
Although hard to believe, SAP integration can be completely configuration-based through an intuitive visual environment that requires no end-user programming.
Junot Systems’ NLINK Suite of products allows functional business users to perform complex and sophisticated integration tasks and provides a scalable and maintainable integration solution as business processes and systems change over time.
NLINK’s patented and SAP Certified technology has been designed from the ground-up to provide real-time bi-directional communications between disparate plant floor applications and SAP.
Traditional integration solutions require IT staff with Hard to Find Skill Sets , skilled not only in the underlying protocols, data formats and plant floor systems, but also in the development environment of the integration tool itself.
Staffing today’s integration projects with the right skill sets is a real problem adding higher project risk and increasing the expense of already complex implementation projects.
The NLINK approach allows business users and IT staff with Easy to Find Skill Sets to design, build and deploy SAP interfaces to the plant floor.
No programming knowledge or in-depth information technology skill set is required to complete a successful SAP integration project, on-time and within budget. Experience has shown us that new users become productive immediately upon completion of initial NLINK product training.
In many approaches and tools, this is true.
However, NLINK’s SAP Connector does not force you to install anything into your SAP landscape or modify your SAP system in any way.
You can choose to call any standard or custom BAPI or RFC, or any standard or customized IDOC. When all else fails, use a SAP BDC to post data to SAP where no suitable API exists.
In addition, the NLINK SAP Query component can retrieve data from any standard or custom SAP table or view in the data dictionary.
It includes functionality that allows users to quickly build simple queries to extract exactly the data they require from multiple tables or views in a single call. Giving you the ability to get to every single piece of data in your SAP system with absolutely no custom ABAP programming.
Not true when you have robust store-and-forward capabilities.
NLINK provides persistent local data storage that allows transactional information to be temporarily stored during unscheduled systems or network downtime.
Once the SAP system comes back online and re-establishes communications with the NLINK Server, the transactional data is processed and forwarded onto the now functional SAP system.
The NLINK Server ensures that there is no loss of data and that the messages are processed once and only once and sent in the correct sequence.
NLINK’s small deployed footprint and simple to use Management Console make it easy to deploy and manage at the plant floor level.
Integration architectures that can only be deployed at the corporate level (because they require lots of expert care and feeding) are on the wrong side of the store-and-forward equation.
When plant connectivity goes down, so does your ability to operate. With the integration hub at the plant floor, store- and-forward buffers and then resynchronizes the data automatically, smoothing out connectivity interruptions.
It does not need to be.
Traditional SAP integration solutions have failed to gain widespread acceptance because they are too expensive and complex for all but the largest of companies and the most critical of applications.
This makes Enterprise Application Integration an underutilized technology due to the large initial cost and even larger cost of implementation. NLINK is component-based; NLINK CoNNectors, eXtenders and Modules can be mixed
and matched to create the optimal integration solution.
NLINK customers pay only for the components that they actually use. Over time, as the integration project evolves, incremental costs are added only when significant new functionality is required.
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