What an enterprise architecture should look like in a modern factory environment

I started my last blog with an anecdote of a recent factory visit. Here’s another one.

We were discussing a conceptual data model for a particular use case. The customer initially believed they already had all the necessary capabilities in place. Still, when we dug into it, they were modeling their data in a legacy ERP, which is very different from the requirements needed for modern data warehousing.

A manufacturing enterprise architecture with legacy ERP sitting on top is relatively common (see diagram). On the left side of the diagram, we describe a typical, current set up and on the right is Fujitsu’s modification based on SAP’s future vision. In the standard ISA-95 model, ERP’s role and functionality are large but in the future they will be more limited. In order to become dynamically agile to react to future changes, we will take certain solutions out to the cloud and enable factories to become microservices enabled.

I hear you asking: Why can’t we keep ISA-95? Modern reporting tools make it easy to visualize and interpret data. But this is only if that data is collected in the correct format, which requires a sequence of order data. In my customer’s case, the legacy model provided many valuable things, like product names, locations, and EANs (a standard for barcodes). However, the data quality was not so good: It was not real-time, limiting flexibility. For example, it provided the ability to identify process manufacturing defects, but this could take hours or even days, leading to bad batches and waste.

Similar legacy modeling barriers start to emerge around data migration to the cloud, where so much of the value available from digitalization resides.