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There's an increasing push from top management to integrate plant systems, CMMS/EAM software, and other business systems such as those in payroll, purchasing, finance, etc. In addition, there's a growing desire for communication between systems on the plant floor.
The need for communication between applications can create serious challenges for companies and their IT departments. Most companies use separate software applications for each department and functional area. The result is often a combination of old and new systems, enterprise suites, dedicated software/hardware such as PLCs, and homegrown software. In the past, achieving integration was difficult for IT, and the cost and complexity of integration kept it out of reach for most companies.
Now, new technologies and standards are changing this picture, giving businesses numerous options for integrating at a reasonable cost. In the past decade, integration suites have become popular. These consist of a middleware application server that schedules and exchanges data between different applications. These tools seek to deliver the integration benefits of an enterprise suite without tying a company to a single vendor's applications. An integration suite can simultaneously share data between payroll, accounting and scheduling software. But while these can deliver strong benefits, they can also be expensive and complicated.
Newer integration alternatives can move data in and out of applications using common industrystandard technologies such as XML (extensible markup language), ODBC (open database connectivity), and even simple delimited data files. Data is...