It was about three years ago, but Fabio Gloria remembers the pain as if it were yesterday. His company, Trelleborg Wheel Systems, was moving its headquarters from Sweden to Italy, and executives wanted production and sales data from the entire business unit -- no small task given the expansive geographic and technological range of the organization.
Trelleborg Wheel Systems, a manufacturer of agricultural and industrial tires, operates five factories in Denmark, Italy, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the United States. Each site has an IBM Corp. (Armonk, NY) AS/400 running different variations of Intentia International AB's (Stockholm, Sweden) Movex enterprise management software.
Many of the company's sales offices, however, run Microsoft Corp.'s (Redmond, WA) Navision enterprise resource planning (ERP). Trying to bring order to the array of applications was Gloria's first challenge. The second, more logistical problem was Sri Lanka's poor Internet access. Despite Trelleborg's virtual private network (VPN), connectivity instability made data acquisition difficult.
"The target is to have an entire view of the business," says Gloria, Trelleborg Wheel Systems' business intelligence manager, located in Tivoli, Italy. "But there's an anarchy of sort in the IT environment. So that meant we needed to find something to collect data from any kind of source." It also had to be able to collect incremental data so as not to tax the VPN -- considering Sri Lanka.
Trelleborg is like so many other companies these days struggling to bring unity across disparate IT deployments in far-flung corners of the world. Executives, looking to strengthen customer and supplier relationships or get a handle on outsourced operations, demand visibility into all aspects of the corporation. Regardless of what's prompting the need for across-the-board data access, the goal is often the same. "To have better control of what we need to produce," says Gloria.
Most managers would turn first to their ERP vendor to design a custom solution around interoperability. Indeed, that was Gloria's initial reaction. He quickly realized, however, that it would be a costly solution with no flexibility and little consistency. So he searched for an alternative.
Gloria found what he was looking for in Sunopsis S.A (Limonest, France), which built an integration product using a native SQL code generation approach that leverages existing relational database management systems (RDBMS). The software, Sunopsis v.3, couples a meta-data repository that maps data from various sources and creates workflows with Java-based message-oriented middleware used as the transport service. More importantly, it has the reliability to ensure no data gets lost in the case of a failed connection.
Everything Under the Sun
The Sunopsis approach differs from traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) solutions in that it does not require a dedicated server to dig out the data. Rather, it uses the existing database engines to perform ETL jobs. "It doesn't matter what database it is talking to as it is not linked to a specific technology," says Yves de Montcheuil, Sunopsis' director of product marketing, based in its U.S. headquarters in Burlington, MA.
In Trelleborg's case, the five IBM AS/400 servers running different versions of Movex do connect back to a dashboard hosted in Tivoli, Italy, which is a data warehouse application based on a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 cluster running Windows 2000 servers and a reporting front-end. The dashboard is populated by extracting information from about 60 different key performance indicators (KPIs). The information is intended for the production manager, but it also gives all managers the ability to check plant performance and have an early recognition system if there's a problem.
Beyond having simple visibility, there are also some business intelligence aspects to the Sunopsis solution. "It's important to know how many pieces we have produced within a day or shift or in each production line," Gloria says. "We need to know what the ratio is between working days, hours and the numbers of pieces produced, [as well as] other indexes around every step of production, including raw materials, cost or quality."
Obviously, with all the different time zones, real-time analysis is not always permissible. But it is the ability to automatically create triggers around the tables generated for each AS/400 system that is the most valuable. "Every minute it polls for new data changes and transfers it immediate to Italy so that I have refreshed data," says Gloria. This kind of incremental data transfer helps avoid issues in Sri Lanka, as the inquiry is close to constant -- so even if the VPN into the country was down one minute, the small data packet would likely still get through in a timely manner.
Ultimately, it has allowed everyone at Trelleborg Wheel Systems to make better decisions, Gloria says. Eventually, he intends to extend the architecture out to suppliers and dealers, an ability enabled through Web services inherent in the new Sunopsis software, called Sunopsis DataServices.
The good news is, there is now an architecture in place that gives Trelleborg's upper management a window into production operations around the world. Gloria, who was sweating it out a few years ago, can take credit for that.