The FlexNet Platform:
Embrace Change, Accelerate Agility
Responding to a frequently changing business environment requires a highly adaptable IT landscape. The FlexNet® platform provides real time visibility and collaboration of plant-level operations, filling the gap between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and automation systems. FlexNet lets you embrace change with agility, throughout your extended enterprise and supply chain network, by including a:
- Business Process Management, or BPM Suite
- Unified Data Model
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Apriso combined these three elements into the FlexNet platform as a solution for Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM). FlexNet enables business process improvement, helping you to achieve excellence across your manufacturing operations.
Flexibility with Manufacturing Business Process Management
Including a BPM Suite within FlexNet gives plant-floor operations and information technology (IT) professionals the ability to quickly configure manufacturing processes with little or no customization. The Suite includes configurable dashboards, an XML-based integration broker and full lifecycle management of manufacturing processes spanning global deployments, as well as multiple versions of processes, master data and other application elements. The benefit is a simplified procedure for business process management – by business managers or IT staff – to address changing business needs.
Beyond simply providing access to BPM technologies, FlexNet delivers a lower total cost of ownership by including ‘out-of-the-box’ business services and process components, available within a business component repository and business process library. These processes have been tailored by Apriso to leverage industry best practices within both discrete and process sectors.
Collaboration with a Manufacturing Unified Data Model
In order to simplify your IT infrastructure and reduce the number of disparate systems, FlexNet delivers its functionality based on a manufacturing unified data model, which covers master, transaction and historic data. The resulting benefit is that each FlexNet application is optimized, utilizing the same data set – across production, quality, maintenance, warehousing, supply chain, and time and labor processes.
Automatic synchronization with ERP Master Data prevents downtime at the execution level, guaranteeing the highest performance of real-time, event-based transactions. As plant operations management shares the same data set, traceability and genealogy is simplified, improving performance of root-cause analyses.
With instant access and control of the underlying data about manufacturing operations, you can both observe and act upon key performance indicator (KPI) metrics such as OEE, Takt Time, Yield and Cycle Time. The FlexNet Unified Data Model provides access to the right data, at the right time, to the right location and end user.
‘Future-Proofed’ with a Service Oriented Architecture
AMR Research defines SOA as “a standards-based approach to managing services made available by different software packages for reuse and reconfiguration.” Now widely recognized as a best practice, FlexNet was built from inception according to a Service Oriented Architecture or SOA, allowing functionality to participate in end-to-end business workflows involving not just FlexNet, but other external systems such as ERP, SCM, PLM, and shop-floor control and data acquisition (SCADA).
As a consequence, FlexNet supports the collaboration of business processes spanning not only multiple vendor equipment platforms and operating systems found on the shop floor, but seamlessly with enterprise applications, providing an ability to retrieve real-time performance metrics from a distributed operations and supply chain environment. This collaboration enables business process management across multiple locations and functions, as well as an efficient way to manage data, avoiding duplication and other non value-added procedures.
Even systems yet to be written for SOA can be “wrapped” with Web services, letting FlexNet consume their functionality, until SOA is ubiquitous.
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