In Episode 62 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Integration Strategies for Manufacturing Success, Jonathan Scott is joined by temporary co-host Juliann Grant, Razorleaf’s Vice President of Global Marketing, for a conversation with another Razorleaf expert. Rodney Coffey, Practice Manager, brings 20 years of experience with integrations and multiple integration platforms to the discussion, and he shares a variety of real-world use cases, as well as market insight into what manufacturers are doing with regard to integrations and digital threads.
Starting Points for Integrations
Rodney explains that in contrast to the past, when organizations would try to stretch one piece of software to cover numerous capabilities, these days they’re more likely to buy multiple different pieces of software that will solve specific problems. But that means all of those pieces of software need to talk to each other in order to create a digital thread. That’s often where Razorleaf comes in.
Customers typically start the conversation very broadly. “A lot of times, they just know they need to get data moved from point A to point B,” Rodney says. Or they start with the “swivel chair” problem—wanting to automate integration rather than having someone pull data out of one system only to swivel in their chair and manually enter it into another. The way Rodney sees it, “When we do an integration, we get the right data to the right place at the right time.” To do so, different pieces of the enterprise need to be connected to each other. Most often they start with connections between PLM and ERP systems.
Another common early use case is configuring integrations for preliminary or prototype BOM releases, which enable different areas of the company to start on some processes (e.g., long-lead orders) while also preserving the ability to fine-tune the product. That process can get complex in a hurry, Rodney notes. “Now we allow the engineers to release a prototype version of the bill, get that information into ERP. Maybe pull information back from ERP into PLM—things like on-hand quantity, inventory, cost. Things that help engineers make a decision about their bill of material.”
It’s More Than a Sync-Up
A big misconception Rodney sees in his integration work is the customer’s idea that they just need to sync everything—to him, “sync” is a four-letter word. “We’re not just syncing two systems, mirroring two databases, and it’s not just arrows pointing from A to B. There’s a lot of passing information back and forth,” he says. “It’s all about getting the right data to people so they can do their job, make good decisions about the data they’re dealing with.”
In addition to the back-and-forth required, there’s often data transformation that needs to occur as the data is moved. An example he shares is BOMs in PLM that may also contain marketing content, specifications, or quality documents—the kinds of information you don’t want to pass to ERP. There may also be business logic to build into the process, for example, what to do with previous shared viewable files when a new version is created and shared? “Our common best practice would be that we’re only going to push the latest,” Rodney says. “So when we go through a revision cycle and this happens the second time, we are eliminating the viewables upstream.” He adds, “We’re doing that cleanup. We’re doing that through building the integration with the client.”
Integration Creates a Digital Thread
Jonathan’s takeaway from Rodney’s many use cases is that “Integration is not just for people with fully deployed systems and really mature processes. Sometimes integration is really about automating something that you do. So don’t think ‘I’m not ready for that.’ It could be just solving a problem you’re dealing with.” Rodney agrees, noting that he gets calls all the time from customers who don’t even realize they need an integration. “They just have a problem moving data to a spot that users can access it,” he says. “And usually has to do with bill of materials information or being able to get the viewable files to a location everybody has access to.” “That’s what a digital thread is,” Jonathan concludes. “People are really building a digital thread when they’re doing these things.”
Learn More About Integration Strategies
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including how integrators tackle working with legacy systems, the interesting new integrations—such as network and data security—becoming popular in the manufacturing space, why change management is one of the top two integrations Razorleaf starts with, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Stay Sharp Episode 62: Integration Strategies for Manufacturing Success, and join us each week for a new podcast.
