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1、STRATUS ARTICLERexams Agile IT Initiative Keeps Plants RunningA division of London-based Rexam,an$8-billion packaging manufacturer with 24,000 employees and operations in 20 countries,had invested heavily in automating its 17 North American beverage can plants,which supplied cans to customers such a
2、s Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola.A single instance of SAPs R/3 enterprise application suite linked the plants to the administrative processes that replenished raw materials,determined the next orders to be manufactured,and invoiced customers.Sever that linkwith a network outage,or systems being taken
3、off-line for an upgradeand life became not unlivable,but difficult.For manufacturing plants running at full capacity,downtime wasnt acceptable.Rexam addressed the challenge using SAP xAPP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence(xMII)to allow continued plant production when the network was unavail
4、able.In addition,fault-tolerant,high-availability servers from Stratus Technologies ensured that local resources needed for production,including SAP xMII,were always available.While use of high-availability servers has been fairly common in other industries,their use in production environments is gr
5、owing today.Management recognized that proliferation of productivity-enhancing applications in manufacturingand tending to form into an integrated,mutually dependent“solution”means the risks associated with downtime are increasingly severe.Where it was beforeThe prior modus operandi adopted in the p
6、lants worked well,recalls,John Niemzyk,VP and CIO of Rexam,but wasnt ideal.Any unplanned system downtime was buffered by manual back-up processes.Product got shipped;customers got invoiced;business went on as usualalbeit at the expense of a little more effort than usual.Meanwhile,planned downtime fo
7、r system upgrades and patches took place over holiday periods.Although workable from a systems management perspective,it was less than fully satisfactory,notes Niemzyk.Christmas,for example,was the corporate financial year end,and not a time during which to introduce system changes.And it meant encr
8、oaching on employees holiday time.“Instead of implementing an initiative when it made sense for the business,we were trying to go live on the next convenient holiday,which was usually later than we wished,”says Niemzyk.Researching better ways of dealing with planned and unplanned downtime Fault-tole
9、rant,high-availability servers from Stratus Technologies ensured that local resources needed for production,including SAP xMII,were always available.threw up dispiritingly few alternatives.For a while,says Niemzyk,Plan A was to use two parallel instances of SAP R/3.“Wed take one down and carry out t
10、he upgrade while transacting in the other,”he explains.“Then wed bring back the first instance,re-synchronize,and take the second instance off-line.”The drawbacks were obvious.“It added to overhead,and didnt address communications issues,”says Niemzyk.Address the challengeTo deal with unplanned even
11、ts,some way of continuing to transact on the plant floor during an outage was required.Resynchronization of plant events with SAP R/3 could take place when connections were restored.But the prospect of a third-party manufacturing execution system(MES)with its own database running at each plant was u
12、nappealing.Rexam,says Niemzyk,was looking to strip out complexitynot add to it.The answer emerged when Niemzyks IT team began exploring SAPs newest offeringsand especially SAP xMII.Running SAP xMII on the plant floor,realized Niemzyk,would not only address unplanned network downtime through a“store-
13、and-forward”synchronization capability,but also provide an MES-like facility that was presently lackingincluding data aggregation,plant-level“dashboards,”and RF communications.The so-called“MES”layer can include detailed functionality for work-in-process(WIP)tracking;scheduling;and industry-specific
14、 requirements typically not handled by ERP.In other cases,it simply connotes the means to connect the plant with the enterprise.SAP xMII is the result of that companys further development of the innovative,Web-based solution it obtained in the acquisition of Lighthammer.STRATUS ARTICLESTRATUS ARTICL
15、E|2The SAP xAPP,a kind of composite application called SAP xMII,was launched in 2005 as an integration and manufacturing intelligence solution.In the last year or so,however,says SAP,“it has become a platform for partner development.”The manufacturing software and services providers coalescing aroun
16、d SAP xMII are today part of SAPs Perfect Plant initiative aimed at improved asset performance,manufacturing execution,and operations planning and scheduling.In September 2007,the SAP Perfect Plant Center of Excellence was launched at SAPs U.S.headquarters in Newtown Square,Pa.,operated by a virtual
17、 team from SAP and Tata Consultancy Services(TCS)to showcase SAP manufacturing applications and partner composite applications working together in a simulated plant environment.The origins of SAP xMII are in SAPs 2005 acquisition of Lighthammer,which has proved to be a significant milestone for the
18、use of information technology in manufacturing environments.That acquisition,which surprised many industry observers,either triggered or was the opening salvo to an increasing number of manufacturers wanting to bridge the gap between the business enterprise and integrated plant operations.Thus,plant
19、 operations and other type software applications vendors have seen real increases in these type implementations.Boston-based AMR Researchs Manufacturing Operations Software Spending Report,2007-2008,based on a survey of more than 400 manufacturing and IT professionals,forecasts The Perfect Plant is
20、an SAP initiative aimed at synchronized plant operations,in concert with a range of participating manufacturing industry solution providers.Contd on page 4On site at the Perfect Plants launch Pada 10-percent to 15-percent increase in spending in this area in 2008 over the previous year.The most ofte
21、n cited reason why manufacturers are embracing these solutions now is that with increasingly sophisticated ERP systems,including single global instances,multi-plant production management is a real possibility.This is so,however,only if production units are singing from the same sheet of music.A stan
22、dard set of plant applications sets the stage for measurable performance comparisons and integrated operations.PRODUCTIONSource:SAPPERFORMANCEERPMESAUTOMATIONSAP xMII on the plant floorbacked by a local databasewould enable manufacturing operations to run locally not just for an hour or so,but long
23、enough for even the most severe outage to be fixed.Complex patchings or system upgrades could be done in the data center during the normal work week.Setting a target of 48 hours for what he terms“local sustainability,”Niemzyk began talking to systems integrator Tata Consultancy Services(TCS)about pi
24、loting an xMII application at a single Rexam plant.But on what hardware should the plant-level xMII applications reside?For there was little point,Niemzyk realized,in implementing something that added to overall system vulnerability,rather than reducing it.The hardware equation“Quite literally,we wa
25、nted to never lose a transaction,or miss a heartbeat on the shop floor.The goal was continuous availability,”says Niemzyk.For awhile,installing xMII on server clusters was the plan.But clusters would need scripts to be written to manage the failover process.These scripts would need to be tested and
26、maintained as hardware within the clusters changed.Whats more,clusters often require applications to be modified to recognize the cluster environment that theyre running on.And clusters might necessitate having IT people on-site to manage the process.Niemzyk told his team to look harder,and soon aft
27、er,discussions began with Stratus Technologies,which offers fault-tolerant,high-availability servers.“I knew of Stratus,but in the context of the financial services and health-care industries,and mission-critical applications in government and defense,”says Niemzyk.“Yet the more we looked at Stratus
28、 for the factory floor,the more sense it made:two linked-but-independent boxes on the same chassis,with fully automated diagnostics,fault management,and synchronization.”With certified 99.999+percent uptime and no need for plant-level support,the Stratus boxes also looked like ordinary Windows serve
29、rs from an applications point of view,eliminating requirements to modify applications to run on clusters.But Niemzyk wasnt yet done optimizing availability.As TCS constructed the pilot,its brief included an important rider:At the plant-floor level,the xMII screens were to look exactly like the SAP R
30、/3 screens they were replacing.STRATUS ARTICLESTRATUS ARTICLE|3+Source:SAPDemandAdaptive manufacturing SupplyVP operationsCIOPlant managerOptimizereturn onassetsMeet customerdeliverytargetsMinimizeoperatingcostsMeetquality andcomplianceSAP xMIIMaintenancesupervisorProductionplannerProductionsupervis
31、orPlantITQualitymanagerOEEQMSAP compositesSAP core capabilityISV solutionsProcessDiscreteAllxMIIxLPOWith global corporations benefiting from increasingly sophisticated ERP systems,opportunities exist for optimizing plant operations based on business priorities,resulting from so-called“top floor to s
32、hop floor”integration.Fault-tolerant servers from Stratus Technologies are said to eliminate the operation complexity and high costs inherent in high-availability approaches such as clusters.Enterprise-Operations IntegrationThe logic,he admits,was chiefly driven by the wish to minimize training at t
33、he plants.With screens that looked the same,operatives would transition smoothly from SAP R/3 to SAP xMII.But there was an availability dimension to the decision too.“Weve kept the original transactions live in the SAP R/3 system,”says Niemzyk.“In the unlikely event that we lost the local system at
34、a plant,we could go back to remotely signing on to SAP R/3 at the data center.”By summer 2007,with tests showing the pilot plant was delivering expected levels of availability,the implementation was extended to Rexam Beverage Can NAs 16 other plants.All plants were live by mid-December 2007.“We had
35、great cooperation from Stratus,TCS,and our other partners,and we brought on one or two plants a week.It was that rapid,”says Niemzyk.The solution,adds Frank Hill,SAP alliance manager at Stratus,consists of two Stratus fault-tolerant servers and an external Stratus storage array deployed at each plan
36、t.Specifically,a Stratus ftServer 4300 is used to run SAP xMII and an Oracle 10i database;a Stratus ftServer 2400 runs the Acumence Plant Analytics software;and a Stratus ftScalable storage array maintains all the plant data used for historical analysis.Rexams requirement for continuous availability
37、 and operational simplicity didnt surprise Hill,who notes top-floor to shop-floor integration always includes requirements for high availability.Today,Stratus and SAP jointly offer such a combination under the“Perfect Plant”initiative,including the recently inaugurated Perfect Plant Center of Excell
38、ence(See sidebar).Rexam,Hill says,has gained from transaction store-and-forward functionality.“This is a tremendous benefit in terms of corporate IT flexibility and plant uptime,”says Hill.“It wasnt necessarily where we saw ourselves adding value in manufacturingbut theres little doubt that the dema
39、nd is there for local uptime.Finding opportunities to take the data center off-line is getting tougher and tougher.”Niemzyk concurs.“From a system availability perspective,were getting the uptime we expected,and when network outages occur,we dont miss a heartbeat.”Not least,Rexam will be upgrading t
40、o SAP ECC 6.0 sometime soon,and it wont be at Christmas or Thanksgiving.STRATUS ARTICLESTRATUS ARTICLE|4SAP partners participating in the Perfect Plant initiative include the following:VisipriseSAP Manufacturing Execution by Visiprise is SAPs MES solution for complex,discrete manufacturing industrie
41、sacsisdelivers automated data capture and serialization track-and-trace solutions for SAP ERP and NetWeaver environmentsWerum software&systemsMES provider for the pharmaceutical industry for compliant shop-floor manufacturing and electronic batch records infrastructurenrXasset information management
42、 solution addresses data migration,rapid hand-off of capital equipment operating details from builder to owner,and completing and commissioning of capital productsMeridiumsolution captures and aggregates asset performance data,and provides analyses to decision makersstratus technologiesFault-toleran
43、t,high-availability server systemsBesides xMII,the Perfect Plant initiative today encompasses two additional xApps.SAP xLPO for lean planning and operations On site at the Perfect Plants launch Pad(Contd)is based on key concepts from the famed Toyota Production System,and is the product of SAPs acqu
44、isition of Factory Logic.SAP xVIP is for visual information for plants.The Perfect Plant initiative by no means exhausts the full list of composite applications emanating from SAP and having relevance for manufacturing.Others include for product definition,mergers&acquisitions,and employee productiv
45、ity.Composite applications are built by combining multiple existing functions into a new application.People often compare composite applications to“mashups.”However,composite applications leverage enterprise and enterpriseready sourcese.g.,existing modules or even enterprise Web servicesof informati
46、on,while mashups usually rely on Web-based,and often free,sources.Composite applications often incorporate orchestration of“local”application logic to control how the composed functions interact with each other to produce the new,derived functionality.The pause that refreshes“No one likes to work ov
47、er a holiday period,”says Niemzyk,“and its a significant lifestyle and morale benefit to the IT team not to have to do it.Internally,were calling it IT agility:the flexibility to implement upgrades and patches when it makes sense to do soand not when we have to.”Whats more,SAP xMII has delivered a d
48、ouble benefit in terms of ease of upgrade.Much of the customization of SAP R/3,undertaken to maximize competitive advantage,was in the shop-floor modules,Niemzyk reveals.SAP xMII,which functionally replaces those shop-floor modules,delivers that same customization through an in-built tool kit,making
49、 maintenance easierespecially at major upgrade points.As plans move forward within Rexam to roll out the solution in other geographies and divisions,Niemzyk admits one early characterization of the solution was wrong.“At first,thinking about MES transactions,we started calling the roll-out program M
50、ES-lite,”he confesses.“But in reality,its broader:real-time dashboards,portals to applications like quality,process monitoring,gains from other SAP R/3 modules,and more besidesall based around SAP xMII on the Stratus platform.I dont know what you call it,but its a heck of lot more than just MES-lite