Manufacturing

In today's highly competitive global economy, manufacturing success hinges on the ability to discern and quickly respond to customer demand, and on a rapid time- to- market for introducing new or updated products. Moving fast—whether it be in response to a change in customer demand or to a problem on the production floor—necessitates an infrastructure that enables people to access business intelligence where it's needed, when it's needed.

The key to an agile infrastructure is a connected network of manufacturing support systems, both across the organization and across its trading partners. Incompatible IT systems necessitate manual interventions across system boundaries, resulting in redundancy and errors. A lack of visibility across systems increases production time when inventories fall short of production requirements. And a poorly integrated supply chain means that collaboration with trading partners falls short of expectations when critical adjustments need to be made to inventory production and distribution.

While the problem with siloed systems is a top priority to solve, manufacturers do not want to revamp their entire IT infrastructure to achieve it. And any investment that they make in application and system access and connectivity must provide rapid time- to- value and significant return on investment. What is needed, therefore, is an approach to integration that leverages existing IT investments and is flexible enough to keep up with changing business needs.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to integrating IT resources that can enable you to leverage existing assets, while at the same time building an infrastructure that can readily respond to new business pressures and deliver new dynamic applications. The SOA approach can help free application functionality from its underlying architecture, and make existing and new services available for consumption over the network.

Microsoft has a comprehensive SOA offering that:

• Provides developers, architects and IT professionals with the tools, technologies, framework and guidance for building and maintaining SOA solutions.
• Provides business users with personal productivity software that can help your organization increase productivity, lower costs, and promote organizational agility by streamlining and optimizing business processes.

The manufacturing industry today faces a wide variety of challenges, including the need to improve profitability, reduce business and manufacturing process complexity, and gain better business insight in order to stay on top of their industry. Manufacturers must respond to business events in real-time, make products in response to customer demand and outsource a wide variety of functions. And depending on the specifics of the manufacturing industry, challenges can get a lot more complex.

Microsoft, in conjunction with industry-leading partners, delivers integration, automation, and business process management solutions to a range of manufacturers, including those in vertical industries such as automotive, chemicals, consumer packaged goods, high technology, and oil and gas. These industry-specific solutions provide a flexible, scalable, and reliable platform that enables businesses to be more agile and connected. As a result, manufacturers are empowered to shorten product development cycles, integrate operations with partners and suppliers, acquire and share intelligence in real time, and more easily communicate with customers.

Business process management (BPM) solutions integrate across legacy systems and trading partners, as well as provide visibility into end-to-end manufacturing processes, helping organizations to obtain comprehensive real-time business intelligence. The best BPM software helps business users achieve these goals using tools that are intuitive and easy to use, and yet are powerful enough to achieve flexible and robust business solutions.