Plant software providers roll out SAP-connected solutions

At its Sapphire conference earlier this year, SAP announced that one of its main initiatives would be greater connectivity of its systems to plant-floor software solutions following the ISA S95 standard. Evidence of action in this area can be seen in the following two announcements from Wonderware and Lighthammer .

Wonderware begins business-to-manufacturing system implementation with SAP

Wonderware has begun its first customer-project implementations using the latest version of SAP NetWeaver in an ISA S95 XML standard-based, plant-to-business integration environment using the ArchestrA architecture. The collaboration uses the plant-to-business XML standards defined by ISA S95 combined with open integration architectures, which encompasses Invensys’ ArchestrA for the plant and SAP NetWeaver for the enterprise.

This first implementation is underway at Arla Foods in Denmark. Arla Foods is a dairy enterprise with production facilities in Denmark, Sweden, the U.K. and Argentina. With 20,000 employees and 70 production sites, the company produces milk, yogurt, cheese, spreadables, and powder proteins.

“Integration of business and manufacturing has strategic importance for Arla Foods,” says Arne Svendsen, production IT manager, “to optimize production performance and fulfill food safety regulatory requirements. “This integration is a key point for a complete, internal supply chain, which includes the transfer of detailed production schedules to the shop floor, as well as the seamless collection of key production figures.”

Lighthammer broadens SAP partnership

Lighthammer has announced it will broaden its partnership with SAP to provide universal manufacturing integration to support SAP’s adaptive manufacturing strategy. Under the expanded relationship, SAP will use Lighthammer technology to support initiatives central to SAP’s adaptive manufacturing strategy.

As part of this agreement, Lighthammer solutions will be adapted to provide plant-floor connectivity for SAP’s role-based manufacturing intelligence dashboards, allowing real-time access to data, events, and key performance indicators from manufacturing automation and other non-SAP shop-floor systems. Lighthammer’s Manufacturing Adapter for SAP NetWeaver will be deployed as a “universal plant-floor adapter” for SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI). This service will extend SAP XI to enable real-time integration of plant data, events, and transactions to provide an enabling layer for plant-to-enterprise integration to SAP solutions based on the ISA S95 standard.

—David Greenfield, editorial director, Control Engineering, dgreenfield@reedbusiness.com

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