For almost 50 years, US-based Roush has been widely recognized for providing many of the world’s largest companies with innovative engineering, testing, prototyping and manufacturing services. Roush leverages services across the complete product development cycle to solve complex technical challenges for customers in the advanced mobility, aerospace, defense and theme park industries.
Roush has been a long-time PeopleSoft FSCM user. Recently, Roush, in conjunction with Smart ERP Solutions, implemented Oracle Cloud Supply Planning replacing PeopleSoft Production Planning that has been in use at Roush for many years but is no longer in support by Oracle. Roush integrated PeopleSoft Supply Chain Management with Oracle Cloud Supply Planning allowing our users to begin gaining familiarity with Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management. This will allow Roush to adopt additional cloud applications more easily in the future.
The integration is fully orchestrated from within the PeopleSoft system, allowing the process to be fully integrated with existing PeopleSoft scheduled processes. Existing delivered PeopleSoft processes and capabilities have been leveraged to minimize the amount of custom coding and to ensure that all transactions created or modified in PeopleSoft conform to all required business application logic.
The integration and use of the Cloud Planning application allows Roush to use features required for our manufacturing environment. These include:
- Cloud constrained planning.
- Bill of material substitutes.
- Alternate bill of materials and routings.
- Subcontracted manufacturing.
- Product Configurator.
- The ability to use different calendars for and to link suppliers to calendars.
- Support for supplier capacity in the constrained plan.
Integration details
- An Application Engine program extracts over 50 different data files from the PeopleSoft FSCM system in file-based data import (FBDI) flat-file format and puts them into a single zip archive.
- Through PeopleSoft Integration Broker, web services are used to upload the data to the Universal Content Server in the cloud, load the file into Planning, and then create the supply plan.
- Users then interact with the supply plan using the standard functionality available in the Cloud Supply Planning module to review recommendations on new or modified purchase orders and manufacturing work orders.
- Once the planning recommendations are approved and released in Cloud Supply Planning, a process is run from PeopleSoft to download the recommendations in a zip archive via web services, unzip the archive, and place the data in flat files in the PeopleSoft system.
- A delivered component interface is used to create new process identification numbers (PIDs) or modify existing PIDs as required. A custom PID staging workbench has been built to allow users to view the status of the transactions and to perform error correction and reprocessing of any failed transactions.
- Delivered staging tables are used along with standard processes such as purchase order calculation and purchase order create to create new purchase orders or process purchase order changes. The delivered Purchase Order staging workbench is used to perform error correction and reprocessing of any failed transaction.
- Additional processes have been created that utilize web services in order to automatically run an Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence report in the cloud and download the results into custom PeopleSoft reporting tables. This allows the creation of Business Intelligence reports that combine both PeopleSoft and Cloud data.
A key difference between PeopleSoft SCM and Cloud SCM is that, with cloud applications, new updates are automatically applied on a quarterly basis. With each quarterly update, one or more FBDI templates are updated with new or changed columns of data. In order to streamline the process of making any necessary changes to the integration that are needed to accommodate these updates, the integration has been built in a highly modular fashion:
- The number of file extracts, the names of those extracts, and the column headings are all maintained on a configuration page. Therefore, each of these can be modified as needed with no changes in code.
- All extracts are performed using standalone SQL objects. This means that if new columns need to be added to an extract or existing columns need modification, anyone with appropriate SQL skills and knowledge of the data can make these changes with no need to modify any PeopleCode. Since each extract is a standalone object, only those objects that are impacted by the update need to be touched.
- If additional extracts are required to enable new functionality, all that is needed is to create a new SQL object with the logic and add that SQL object to the configuration page. The Application Engine program that creates the extracts will automatically include the new extract with no PeopleCode changes.