IT Infrastructure for a Manufacturing Company

To design an IT infrastructure for a manufacturing company, map the architecture to the business process.

ERP System: Obviously there will be a transaction system which will be used for order entry, financial transactions etc. Mostly, an ERP system is used to maintain these transactions. This is also the reason why most CFO's readily agree for ERP systems or sometimes they ask for implementation of ERP systems. This also provides them a single view of all transactions across all divisions and all geographies. All the transaction systems in the company connect to the ERP system to make it a system of records. Some examples of ERP systems are SAP, Oracle etc. It provides data on Engineering, Bills of Material, Scheduling, Capacity, Workflow Management, Quality Control, Cost Management, Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Projects, Manufacturing Flow, General Ledger, Cash Management, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets etc

Buy Side Software: On top of an ERP sits a buy side software. This software assists the manufacturing company to buy its material from a network of suppliers. Some examples of this software are Ariba, Commerce 1.

Supply Chain Software: Supply chain software helps to maintain inventory, procurement and manufacturing. It also helps in demand planning and forecasting. Some examples of this software are i2, Manhattan Associates, Managestics.

Sell Side Software: Then there is a sell side software to connect to resellers, distributors, retailers and customers. This software is also known as CRM software.

Data Warehouse: Data warehouse takes data from all databases and consolidates it in such a form that can be easily queried. It also aggregates data from different systems, for different periods etc so that a combined query could be written on this data.

Business Intelligence: These softwares run queries on data warehouse to come out with reports that help senior management take decisions. It also come out with patterns and trends to develop strategy for a company.

Enterprise Application Integration: This set of software help one set of software to speak to the other set. e.g. it will help ERP system (SAP) to speak to DataWarehouse (Oracle). This software is becoming of less relevance because most applications provide protocols to talk to other applications and with the advent of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

It has been seen that there are different players who are good in one or more of each of these types of softwares. However, there is a consolidation and these players are trying to capture various segments. e.g. SAP has moved from ERP to provide buy side software also, i2 has acquires Aspect to provide buy side software, Oracle has acquired Peoplesoft etc. In the days to come, it seems the players who can either integrate all these niche softwares or who can provide a suite that provides everything and is best of breed, will win.