For many manufacturers, the Holy Grail of enterprise applications is one that deploys a common set of business applications across the enterprise. For good reason: With a single, standard set of enterprise applications, manufacturers could enforce common processes -- everything from end-of-year reporting to material procurement -- across the entire enterprise. The pursuit of that kind of consistency and efficiency in large part drove the widespread deployment of ERP applications in manufacturing companies in the 1990s. But what happens when that consistent set of business processes must be changed because, say, your company has made a major acquisition or decided to outsource production or distribution to a new offshore partner? Can you change your business applications and deploy the changes across your company fast enough to keep up? Or, in times of rapid change, do your enterprise applications act like cement, fixing key business processes in place? As many manufacturers have discovered, the generation of enterprise applications built on client/server-style architectures has all too often inhibited rather than enhanced agility. That's because many of the same characteristics that helped make client/server systems tightly integrated; i.e., procedural code and proprietary interfaces, also made them monolithic and difficult to change. "Today, if there's a change in the business environment and a decision-maker wants to change the way things are done, software often holds them back from moving forward," says Mike Ehrenberg, director of architecture development at Microsoft's Business Systems division. "We need to turn that around so that software can help accelerate change." With that goal in mind, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and most other vendors of enterprise applications are embarking on a drive to restructure their applications, replacing client/server underpinnings with something being called service-oriented architectures (SOAs). According to these vendors, the benefits of SOAs will be many and will include quicker, easier enterprise application upgrades and easier, more flexible integration of applications. SOAs are also expected to make enterprise applications much easier to alter, enabling manufacturers to become more agile when responding to business change. "SOA has the promise to be a game-changing technology, and one that will improve the agility of manufacturers," says Eric Austvold, research director at AMR Research (Boston). Apparently manufacturers agree. A recent AMR survey showed that, according to IT managers, the number one anticipated benefit of SOAs is "faster, more flexible reconfiguration of business processes." (See chart on facing page.) "Top management today expects projects to be finished in weeks or even days because the market is changing more rapidly and competitors are behaving in new ways," says Thomas Sauerland, CIO at Veka, AG (Sendenhorst, Germany), a maker of window and door components which has begun to deploy SOA-enabling technology from SAP AG. "There is a need to pursue the SOA idea because markets are changing and becoming more competitive." The Game Plan So how will SOAs enable agility? The SOA notion, essentially, involves decomposing what have been large, monolithic applications into a series of smaller, more modular services. These services are pieces of self-contained code that execute a specific business function -- confirm an order, for example -- and communicate with one another using a series of Web-based messaging standards. Because these services use standards to communicate, they will be interoperable, meaning that, at least in theory, it will be as easy for services running at different companies to seamlessly interact as it will be for services running within an enterprise. This should take much of the time and effort out of integrating enterprise applications. "SOA allows a node in a supply chain, for example, to expose information in a controlled, secure way to the outside world in real time," says Paul Farrell, vice president of worldwide research and development at ERP vendor Epicor Software Corp. (Irvine, CA). "It allows information to be exposed in the same way an e-mail system exposes information." But what will make SOA-based systems more agile, proponents say, is the way they will be assembled. Client/server applications -- at least the business logic layer of client/server applications -- were typically written as large, highly interdependent clumps of code. Changing any of the processes supported by that code usually required getting programmers involved and that necessitated an often long, difficult requirements-gathering and documentation process. And, often, changing one part of the application required programming changes in other parts of the application. Building SOA-style applications, in contrast, will be more like composing systems out of pre-built modules or services. Through graphical business process management tools, enterprises will be able to model how they want a process to flow. Using that model, the tools will automatically do much of the technical work involved in assembling the right service in the right way. This approach should remove much of the time-consuming coding from creating or changing applications, experts say. It will also allow business managers themselves to model and implement new business processes rather than always working through programmers in the IT organization. "These types of tools put business people in the driver's seat on the composition of applications," says David Bernstein, a vice president at Siebel Systems Inc., which plans to roll out an SOA-style business process management workbench called Siebel Component Assembly in June. "These things are no longer buried in code and are modularized so that if, for example, the business people want to add a service to calculate shipping costs or tax estimates, they can just plug that in." That approach to application composition apparently sounds good to many manufacturing managers. In fact, 21% of manufacturing companies have already begun to deploy or develop SOA software, and another 46 percent said they plan to implement or evaluate SOA software over the next 24 months, according to a recent AMR Research survey. One manufacturer that has begun to take advantage of more agile SOA-style development is NewPage Corp. (Dayton, OH), a maker of coated paper with five production plants in the U.S. In order to build stronger business relationships with its customers and their distributor partners in what is increasingly becoming a mature commodity business, NewPage last year launched a business-to-business portal called ChangingInc that allows customers to build and run their own online product catalogs and to put together requests for quotes. The system is built using IBM's Websphere SOA platform, and key elements such as the catalog are implemented as reusable services. That allows NewPage's customers to easily deploy the catalog and request-for-quote functionality themselves and, using Web standards such as XML, integrate the online systems with their own back-end systems. "Because the pieces are implemented as shared building blocks, it's easy for customers themselves to build and deploy their own catalogs with their own pricing," says Karthik Raghavan, business manager for emerging markets and technologies at NewPage. "We build it, but they can control it." By this time next year, Raghavan says, the company expects to have signed up 4,000 distributors to the ChangingInc portal. Already, however, the system is paying dividends. Since launching ChangingInc, NewPage has brought in several major new distributors who required online catalogs and ordering. Rolling Out SOA IBM and Siebel are not the only enterprise application vendors moving to SOA-enabled application composition. Both SAP and Oracle will be transforming their enterprise applications around SOA architecture over the next two to three years. Supply chain software vendor i2 Technologies Inc. (Dallas) is rolling out what it calls its Agile Business Process Platform, an SOA framework that underlies new applications such as its recently-announced Supply Chain Visibility product. Epicor's latest ERP offering, Vantage 8.0, is built on top of a services architecture, and the company's recently-announced Service Connect tool will allow customers to easily compose services into composite applications. Meanwhile, Microsoft is embarking on a two-phase SOA migration of its various enterprise application suites. Phase one, due to be completed in 2007, will see Microsoft expose service interfaces to its current applications that will be callable through the company's Windows Communications Foundation tools. That will make integration easier and allow customers to begin modeling business processes and composing workflows. In the second wave, due by 2008, Microsoft will break apart its existing applications and re-implement them as a series of independent services. Microsoft will also add tools that will allow customers to monitor and report on the performance of their services-based business process in real time, according to Ehrenberg. But deploying such tools -- once they become available -- will comprise only part of the journey manufacturing organizations will face in migrating to service-oriented architectures. New skills and new organization structures, too, will have to be part of the mix. Specifically, says AMR's Austvold, IT organizations and the individuals within them will need to become much more process-aware, with an understanding of how end-to-end processes work and how they will need to change in response to the needs of the business. In addition, Austvold says, IT organizations will need to put in place committees and rules to govern the creation and management of reusable services. He suggests that such responsibilities may soon come under the purview of a Chief Process Officer. "How do you author services, secure them, scale them, and what's the process around changing them?" Austvold asks. "These will increasingly become important questions." Widespread deployment of SOA technology and its supporting organizational changes won't happen overnight. Austvold, in fact, predicts it will take 10 years for SOA to truly replace client/server architectures. The wait should be worth the payoff: The ability for manufacturers to respond in much more agile ways to business change.