Do you know how long inventory has been sitting on your factory floor? What was the time lapse before it arrived at your distributor? How long did it spend on the distributor’s shelf? When it was finally sold, what price was paid? How does this amount compare to the total cost of manufacturing, warehousing and transporting the product?
What about your own high value assets? Can you see where they are in your supply chain? Can you tell how long each item has been in transit and identify any bottlenecks, immediately?
There are some people in manufacturing today who can answer all of these questions simply by opening a few screens on their desktop. These people come from companies at the front of the global manufacturing race; able to make strategic real-time changes to propel their business ahead at high speed.
Such companies have realised that leveraging plant floor data is a relatively easy thing to do. You don’t need to be an IT genius, and your business processes don’t require massive reengineering.
This is the message Microsoft is now spreading with the fifth release of its core business processing server, BizTalk. Released in September, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 enables a company to connect with each of its own diverse systems and those of its trading partners, in a way that brings rich information into the core of the enterprise. This now includes access to data from radio frequency identification (RFID) and electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, as well as easy connections to SAP, JD Edwards and home grown line business systems.
An easy way to understand BizTalk is to think of it in terms of ‘connecting’ and ‘automating’, Microsoft Senior Product Manager for BizTalk Server, Steve Sloan told FEN.
“The server connects to systems, but it also has logic about how and when each of those systems is conducted,” he said.
Sloan gave the example of RFID. In this case, readers connect directly with BizTalk.
“We have made it really simple to connect to RFID readers. We’ve worked with large hardware manufacturers to create a simple interface to provide plug-and-play capability on all their reader devices.”
Through automation, BizTalk is then able to sort through noisy RFID data.
“We have a business rules editor that sits in the RFID server. By having this capability at the edge of Biztalk, you can correlate RFID events so that they make sense,” Sloan said.
Setting business rules in BizTalk is as easy as ticking boxes, according to Sloan.
“It’s a lot like setting a rule in your Outlook Inbox, where you click a box to say: ‘If an email comes from my manager, colour it blue’. Imagine that same simplicity applied to a business rules editor as opposed to actually having to go back into the application and write new code.”
Once a company has this valuable data filtering through to its core systems, it can provide visibility to its customers and gain a better understanding of what’s happening in its own business.
One Sydney-based clothing company has been using information like this to make regular decisions about which products it should continue and which it should discontinue. The company, which has several branches in Australia and manufacturing operations in Asia, adopted BizTalk RFID beta 2 to see the complete picture of time and costs spent in designing, creating and selling garments. By knowing the exact figures for each stage leading up to a sale, the company has been able to make informed decisions on whether to maintain, expand or discontinue products.
Another example is CHEP, the largest pallet and container leasing company in the world. Using Biztalk RFID beta 2 CHEP has accessed more detailed real-time information on its assets, but also provide its customers with more accurate billing information. Results have included reduced manual processes, more synchronised production lines, reduced processing times, more efficient use of supply stock, reduced storage area and reduced time in transport and other related processes.
In Biztalk 2006 R2 Microsoft has shown its trust in RFID. In light of this, Sloan said manufacturers should have confidence to use the technology.
“By making RFID part of a trusted platform and by partnering with Intel, the message we are sending is that this technology is ready for adoption.”
Microsoft has made sure this technology is accessible to all manufacturers by providing a new Branch Edition of BizTalk, available at US$1800 per unit.
“That is less than one tenth the price of this software historically. So you see, we're trying to take down all of the barriers to adoption,” Sloan said.
Australian Microsoft MVP, Mick Badran, founder of Breeze Training Sydney, said Branch Edition is a clincher for many Australian manufacturing companies.
“For US$1800 customers can drop this in their business and have their system up and running in a very short period of time,” Badran told FEN.
“Branch Edition is limited to two processes but it runs RFID very well. It will appeal to suppliers that aren’t really technology focused and haven’t really got established integration paths to distributors and customers, who want to take advantage of RFID.”
By providing Adaptors in BizTalk to make sure a company’s technology for reading data is integrated with the same system that connects to line of business systems — whether SAP, JD Edwards or home-grown — Microsoft has provided a much clearer, more natural link between data at the absolute edge of the business and how it gets back to the core of the enterprise. The only problem now is what to do with the information, according to Badran.
“These companies have never had that information in real time before. It’s normally taken six to nine months — the time of a stocktake — to get that sort of data. But when companies don’t recognise the benefits they can get from their data, their competitors will.”
To help customers figure this out, Breeze Training has written a course called Biztalk RFID End-to-End. The idea is to familiarise companies with BizTalk RFID and help them to think practically about how it might be used to intelligently manage their processes and production lines. The two-day intensive course (three days if preferred) is aimed at solution architects in the manufacturing and supply chain sectors and has been licensed by Microsoft for international use. Courses commence this month.
www.breezetraining.com.au
www.microsoft.com/biztalk
Add a comment