| Agile Product Lifecycle Management Integration Pack for SAP: Design to Release Implementation Guide Release 3.5 E73102-01 |
|
 Previous |
 Next |
| Agile Product Lifecycle Management Integration Pack for SAP: Design to Release Implementation Guide Release 3.5 E73102-01 |
|
Previous |
Next |
The Agile Product Lifecycle Management Integration Pack for SAP: Design to Release pre-built integration is designed to address the primary requirements for product information synchronization between Agile Product Collaboration and System Application and Products (SAP).
The Agile Product PLM Integration Pack for SAP: Design to Release pre-built integration is aimed at enabling product development process between Agile PLM and SAP. This integration allows rapid implementation of Agile's next generation integrated enterprise PLM processes and helps customers to reduce the cost and mitigate risks associated with third party and custom integrations.
This integration aims to meet the following objectives:
Follows a business process flow
Maintains data accuracy and integrity at all times in both the systems
Allows for easy configuration of business process flow, data field mappings, and transformations tools, such as Rules, Lookups, and User Exits
·Provides for robust exception handling including ease of understanding for end user, strong notification configurability, and easy troubleshooting
These are the functionalities of the Agile PLM to SAP integration:
Manufacturing release of new product definition and product launch
Change Management of previously launched products
Bi-directional synchronization of Engineering Change status and Item Cost information, from SAP to Agile PLM
Tracking and monitoring of the change processing queue
The Agile PLM to SAP integration is requester-provider type integration, as shown in this diagram:
These are the Agile to SAP Processes:
Change Order Release
New Part Request
During the product design phase, new products and parts are introduced and existing parts go through design changes. Change Orders (CO) are used to release information about the attributes as well as the design information of a part to the manufacturing system.
The Change Order Release Process (CORP) constitutes of New Part/Product Release (PREL) and Product Design Modification flows of Agile PLM.
While Agile is the system of record for item description, design, specifications, and so on, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system typically has many more attributes and placeholders for information than the PLM system. Therefore, the change order release must be updated in the ERP system.
The release of a change order in Agile PLM system acts as a trigger for the synchronization of product design information with the ERP system. Because the Agile PLM system is the system of records for product design data, the synchronization process typically involves the transfer of the released revision of the product design from Agile PLM to the manufacturing system. The Agile PLM system should be configured to trigger the synchronization process on any Change Order status as required.
The Change Order Release and New Product Release processes use the same integration sequence.
For more information about the integration for both processes, see Chapter 3, "Process Integration for New Part Request".
You can trigger a New Part Request (NPR) process on-demand. This is a synchronous process, which reserves and fetches the part number from the SAP system.
For more information about NPR processes, see Chapter 3 - Process Integration for New Part Request.
Although Agile PLM is considered the system of records, there may be several part attributes that are maintained within ERP. To provide information on these attributes within the PLM item data, the SAP to Agile process enables synchronous or batch updates of the configured field values from ERP into the designated item fields of Agile PLM.
For example, the update of the cost of an item in ERP gets updated in Agile PLM in batch mode, based on the background schedule of the job in SAP.
These are the design assumptions and constraints:
Design Assumptions
Agile Content Server (ACS) is used for Events to trigger the payload from Agile PLM to the Integration.
This design assumes that the following statements are true:
Pre-defined blank templates are available for Custom fields
Transformation logic for classification elements are pre-coded in the out-of-the-box (OOTB) XSL. However, modifications may be required to suit your PLM implementation
This design leverages Oracle Application Integration Architecture (Oracle AIA) Error Handling Framework.
Design Constraints
In some cases, configuration driven XSLT may not reflect the changes immediately and may require a restart because the main XSL sheet gets cached after a successful compilation
ACS limits the Events to be triggered from workflow only for the Change Status, which may be used for this Integration.
Error handling capabilities of this integration are constrained by the capabilities of the Oracle AIA Error Handling Framework.
The Agile PLM Integration Pack for SAP: Design to Release pre-built integration includes the following components:
Agile Content Service (ACS)
Software Development Kit (SDK)
Agile Process Extensions (PX)
Web Service Extensions (WSX)
Oracle AIA Foundation Pack
SAP
ACS is an event-driven XML-based publishing service that makes the product record available to a wide variety of business applications and users, both internally and across the global manufacturing network. In addition to allowing employees and supply chain partners to publish the product record on demand, ACS can be configured to automatically to publish the Item Master and Bill of material (BoM) changes during any phase of the product lifecycle to multipledestinations, thereby ensuring that everyone is working with up-to-the-minute information.
The output generated by an ACS module is an Agile XML (aXML) file or a PDX package.
SDK contains a collection of tools; application programming interfaces (APIs), sample applications, and documentation. You use SDK to build custom applications that access the Agile application server functionality. By using Agile SDK, it's possible to create programs that perform tasks automatically in Agile PLM.
Agile SDK enables the following operations:
Integrate Agile PLM with SAP or other custom applications.
Develop applications to process product data.
Perform batch operations against the Agile Application Server.
Agile API: A Java API with interfaces that expose Agile PLM business objects. Use Agile API to create additional Agile PLM clients. You can also use it as part of an extension developed using web service extensions (WSX) or process extensions (PX).
Agile SDK has the following modules:
Process Extension (PX): A framework that allows you to extend the functionality of Agile PLM clients by adding external reports, user-driven and workflow-driven customized actions, customized tools, and customized automatic number sources. PX helps in binding the data in Agile PLM with other applications.
|
Note: The new part request is the only process integration that uses PX to extract the Agile PLM data and send it to the Application Business Connector Service (ABCS). |
Web service Extension (WSX): A framework that allows you to extend the functionality of the Agile PLM server and expose customer-specific solutions using a web service. WSX is a Web service engine enabling communication between Agile PLM and disparate systems both internal and external, including ERP systems. WSX can be used to provide content to exchanges, reports, and custom applications, and import product content data from ERP and other supply chain applications. WSX simplifies the process for aggregating raw product content and making critical product content available in real time to other core systems.
For more information about Agile PLM components, see the Agile Product Lifecycle Management Administrator Guide and the SDK Developer Guide.
The Oracle AIA Foundation Pack allows you to simplify cross-application business process integrations using a standards-based, pre-built integration solution. Designed to promote rapid deployment, re-usability, and configurability of business processes, the Oracle AIA Foundation Pack saves significant time, effort and cost, compared to building integrations from the ground up. It also helps you realize the value of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) at an accelerated pace.
The Oracle AIA pre-built integrations are specific to business processes and applications. Built using the Oracle AIA Foundation Pack, these specific business process integrations provide an open, standards-based approach for organizations to integrate end-to-end business processes across a broad range of custom, Oracle or third-party applications.
For more information about the Oracle AIA Foundation Pack development methodology, see Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation.
SAP is an acronym for System Application and Products, which creates a common centralized database for all the applications running in an organization. SAP products are generally focused on ERP.
SAP applications are built to manage product operations, cost accounting, assets, materials and personnel. SAP ERP runs on a majority of platforms including Microsoft Windows and it uses client and server model. SAP provides a majority of new dimensional enterprise products namely Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Advanced Planning and Optimizer (APO), and so on.
