Integrating SAP with PDM using SharePoint
Company Description
Manufacturing a product involves iterative process to refine and enhance the final customer ready product. The engineering teams need to have a strong grip on the tracking and management of changes to monitor the impact it can have on market place in terms of costs, time to market.
The client is one of the leading manufacturers of ancillaries and components in the Automobile industry. The client has a team of about 1000+ engineers working on the new product development and current product enhancements at any given time.
Project Description
The information related to products is handled through a Product Data Management (PDM) application which includes engineering data such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, drawings and their associated documents.
Application engineers log in to the PDM system to locate the specific part and note down the part number, part description, associated CAD models, and drawings and then log into to the SAP system with the associated details to raise a BOM. Any change or modifications to the part details needed to be carefully monitored before raising the BOM. The manual process of coordinating and keeping track of the changes and raising the BOM was a time consuming and error prone process.
To avoid the double entry of data which was manual and error prone and be able to manage any changes in the future seamlessly, an interface was required to integrate the PDM and SAP system.
Solution
The BI component of SharePoint 2007 provides rich feature set for gathering and collating critical information across systems that enables decision makers to access information from, anywhere, anytime. The Business Data Catalog service of SharePoint is used to integrate SAP and PDM to provide a unified view of the information across these two disparate systems. A custom web part is written for the frequently used queries run by the application engineers
Single Sign On (SSO) provides the means for BDC service to retrieve user credentials required when accessing SAP and PDM. ‘Excel Services’ feature of SharePoint is used by PDM to generate reports.
The connectivity provided by BDC integrates PDM with SAP and also provides connectivity with the commonly used office set of programs for a natural flow of information and interaction to users where they need it. This has greatly enhanced the ability of the engineers to manage & keep track of the changes required for raising the BOM.
Key Benefits
The integration of PDM and SAP system automates the management of all activities with complete support of materials and Bill of Materials in SAP. Drawings, models, interchange formats and view files can be provided across the organization. Construction parts lists and CAD documents are immediately available for all subsequent processes, e.g. production planning, manufacturing and service. With the integration of the SAP modification-service the history of modification for each document is available at all times for all PLM sections.
The productivity is drastically improved as the end users can now view and search all information from the organization through a single interface. BDC provides the ability to display dynamic, real-time content from SAP and PDM without the need to duplicate the data in SharePoint storage.
The productivity savings over a period of one year amounted to $500,000.
