In Episode 56 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Flexible Integration in the Modern Digital Landscape, host Jonathan Scott sits down for a conversation with Razorleaf’s Head of Products, Tim Noce. The two PLM integration experts, who have multiple decades of experience between them, cover what kinds of integrations they’ve seen in the industry, what integration challenges manufacturing organizations should be prepared for when building out digital threads, and what led to the development of Razorleaf’s integration platform CLOVER.
The Evolution of Manufacturing System Integrations
Tim explains that Razorleaf didn’t plan to build an integration platform, “We set out with a bunch of PLM and ERP and MES consultants, manufacturing consultants, helping customers and running into problems. [We had] collections of use cases that couldn’t be solved by anything on the market.” Over time, the collection of tools and strategies they developed became CLOVER, but at the outset, they were dealing with more simple tasks as they helped customers set up PLM and digital threads.
Simple tasks like moving a bill of materials (BOM) from one system to another soon became more complex tasks, because integrators started coding some of the human processing that happens when data is moved. As Jonathan says, “The data just needs to look different in the two systems.” Sometimes that’s moving between a granular view of the data and a general summary. Sometimes that means collecting both file data and metadata from one system and packaging it for what the second system needs. The simplest example is a BOM, which are not one-size-fits-all. Different departments have different needs for a BOM that may involve adding or subtracting detail or even adding information from another system.
More complexity is introduced when two systems need data from a third to be able to talk to each other. One approach to handling those situations, Tim says, is “Somewhere in the middle, shape the data in such a fashion that you can add those types of things, add the logic to build those other data elements or related elements out so that it’s usable at its destination.” Jonathan agrees, noting that if logic needs to be applied to data while it’s in transit from one system to another, there must be something in the middle—because what’s occurring is much more than just passing data.
Tim and Jonathan discuss two aspects of a central hub for integration: the flow or “the direction, the combination, and the distribution of data”; and the business needs, where “I need to do something with [the data] either before it’s transferred, when it’s transferred, or somewhere between,” per Tim. That’s the part that’s not simple A-to-B movement of data. And that’s how and why CLOVER came about, because there was no sense in making “all of the point-to-point connections, trying to create a spider web of data exchange, trying to orchestrate which one executes at which time,” Tim says. “Let’s use a middleware piece with APIs at the boundaries.”
A Digital Thread Requires Complex Integration
A digital thread is, and should be, rich with data. “That means it’s rich with data in different data models, different systems, etc.,” Jonathan says. “And that’s the challenge people are faced with.” An integration hub in the center of your system can make all of the connections, orchestrate all of the data flow, and do all the business processing for you. It can also handle the element of time, because time introduces change. Tim explains, “As the systems change, as the requirements change, as the rules change, as the flow needs to change because you’re introducing new things into your business, your product, or your organizational processes, that integration may need to change.”
Over the years of working on digital thread projects with customers, Razorleaf developed an internal toolkit that encompassed the lessons learned over the years of doing the work and allowed for scaling. Packaging it as an integration platform for the market became an obvious and easy choice. “Our focus was, anybody can do the 80%—that is easy,” Tim says. “But when you get to that last 20%, it complicates things because you need to consider things you didn’t consider in your integration before.” He adds, “We ended up with an integration platform because we needed to solve that 20%.”
Learn More About Integrations for the Digital Thread and CLOVER
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including use cases for why integrations need to happen, how the integrations get more complex, everything you need to pull together to create a digital thread, advantages of having a platform over point-to-point, the challenges of synchronous versus asynchronous communication, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Stay Sharp Episode 56: Flexible Integration in the Modern Digital Landscape, and join us each week for a new podcast.
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