Rockwell Automation this week announced a new offering that it said will help industrial companies bridge the worlds of manufacturing execution systems (MES) and enterprise applications, such as ERP.
The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integration Gateway is a “manufacturing services bus” that allows for the real-time exchange of data from MES or other manufacturing operations management systems to the ERP systems that form the backbone of many manufacturing front offices.
The gateway is “an enterprise service bus that we’ve skinnied down and optimized around the particular needs of manufacturing,” said Keith Chambers, business manager for Rockwell’s Information Software Business, in an interview with Managing Automation.
Rockwell will offer the ERP Integration Gateway as part of its vertically focused MES platforms, helping to facilitate the transfer of crucial business information from the plant to the enterprise and vice versa. That information comes in a variety of forms, according to Rockwell, from production floor quality data, to order planning and scheduling, to tracking of production costs and material usage.