Like their counterparts at many large manufacturing companies, officials at Pratt & Whitney Canada over the years often considered the benefits of integrating the real-time shop floor systems at the company's Montreal aircraft engine manufacturing plant with its SAP enterprise applications. Until recently, however, P&WC shied away from such a plan, which it saw as fraught with complexity and risk.

"We have just about all the brands and versions of plant floor equipment that you can imagine," says Claude Poliquin, business development manager at Pratt & Whitney Canada (Longueuil, Quebec). "That made it a very complex task to connect those all in real time to SAP."

Eighteen months ago, however, concerns about complexity gave way to business imperatives. P&WC customers were demanding detailed, real-time, part-by-part quality information on the engines they were buying. At the same time, P&WC was gearing up to produce a new, small turbofan engine designed for a new generation of inexpensive "air taxi" commercial aircraft. P&WC's business plan called for the company to produce one of the new engines every 12 hours, a rate 30 times faster than the company's typical production turnaround.

P&WC couldn't pull that off without a way to track and analyze in near real time the quality of parts going into its engines. And, in order to do that, the company had to integrate real-time plant floor automation equipment with its SAP ERP system.

Rather than attempting to use traditional application programming interfaces to tie the systems together, Poliquin and his team opted for Web-service-based integration tools from Lighthammer (since acquired by SAP and renamed XMII), which helped streamline the process and included built-in analytical tools. Now entering production, the integration is expected to save P&WC $14 million per year in warranty, scrap, and rework costs, Poliquin says.

P&WC isn't the only manufacturer electing to charge ahead with integration initiatives that in the past might have been considered too high-risk or expensive to pursue. A host of pressures -- from globalization to regulation to rising customer expectations -- are forcing manufacturers to take on more ambitious and complex integration efforts, often involving building ties outside the enterprise walls to customers and partners and, for the first time, creating automated links between real-time plant floor systems and enterprise applications. Add a healthy dose of merger and acquisition activity, and the result is that integration challenges facing manufacturers are more complex and demanding than ever, experts say.

"Integration challenges facing manufacturers are as complex as they've ever been," says Kevin Roach, a vice president at Rockwell Software (Milwaukee).

And that increased level of complexity is showing up in manufacturers' spending priorities. According to a recent survey of 467 manufacturing organizations by AMR Research Inc. (Boston), better utilization and analysis of data -- particularly demand intelligence -- is the number one business initiative driving IT investments.

The Value of Visibility

The need to achieve real-time visibility into end-to-end business processes that are increasingly global and often involve multiple business partners is what ultimately is driving up integration complexity. The AMR study found that in order to improve responsiveness and reduce inventories many manufacturing companies are moving to daily or even hourly rescheduling of production based on demand signals, many of which come from partners outside of the enterprise. And that kind of visibility, experts say, requires higher levels of integration than ever before.