If the PLM eliminates re-keying for a service to another and accelerates product design, it must also communicate with other enterprise systems. This raises the question: how to integrate PLM with SAP and other systems?
PLM is a design software used by various departments who design a product:
- Marketing
- R&D
- Quality
- Production
- etc. …
Data exchange can be done with:
- Internal systems:
- ERP, CAPM, MES, …
- a web portal company
- But also external systems to the company as product catalogs GDSN
There are different ways depending of the company constraints:
- PLM exchanges data directly with third party systems
- A data bus manages exchange with third party systems
We will take a look at the second solution in this post.
ESB data bus
Using a data bus ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) helps to ensure exchanges between applications, provides monitoring via a console and handles errors. In addition, it allows to decouple applications and facilitates the integration of a new application in the information system.
Data exchangewithbeCPGcanbe done in 2ways:
- XML via REST services
- CSV files
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| SOA Architecture : PLM and data exchange |
Real-time synchronization
The data bus can synchronize systems in real-time. A sample scenario is the validation of a product in the PLM:
- The product is approved
- A message is sent to third-party systems involved by this event to feed them
- In return, the data bus feeds the PLM with data of third party systems (eg: identifiers of the product in third-party systems)
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| Data synchronization of the PLM in real time |
Data exchange with catalogs
PLM can also feed external systems to the company such as GDSN catalogs with the GS1 standard. This allows to update several catalogs from the PLM data and avoid re-keying.
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| Publish PLM data to catalogs |
Technologies
There are several data bus in Open Source, some are :
For data transformations, there is Talend Studio.
I hope, you have got the ansers to your question : how to integrate PLM with SAP and other systems?
