Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Vehicle Parts Manufacturer Streamlines Production and Delivers New Customer Value
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Accuride Corporation is one of the largest manufacturers of components for commercial vehicles in North America. The company has 2,600 employees and is based in Evansville, Indiana.
Business Situation
The company’s IBM iSeries–based Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solution made it difficult to correct errors, was hard to maintain, and costly to operate and support.
Solution
Accuride used the Microsoft® application platform to deliver a solution that streamlines integration, improves factory operations and production planning, and provides customers with full visibility into the status of work done on their behalf.
Benefits
n More predictable factory operations
n Improved employee productivity
n Complete customer visibility into the manufacturing process
n Rapid, cost-effective implementation
n Reduced integration costs and IT workload
n Strong reliability, scalability, flexibility, and ease of management / “Not only have we taken IT out of supporting daily business processes, but we’ve also streamlined those processes and given customers visibility into the value we provide within the procurement cycle.”
David Stefanich, Chief Information Officer, Accuride
David Stefanich, Corporate Director of IT, Accuride
Accuride had an IBM iSeries–based Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solution that required frequent attention from IT personnel and was expensive to operate. The company used the Microsoft® application platform to build a new solution that not only improves integration, but also streamlines production planning and provides customers visibility into certain manufacturing processes. Developed in four months with assistance from MPS Partners, the solution has improved factory operations and delivers new customer value. Accuride is realizing technical benefits as well, including high developer productivity, minimal deployment costs, reduced ongoing costs, and a decreased IT workload. Furthermore, the solution’s scalability, reliability, flexibility, and ease of management will help Accuride take advantage of the solution in the future.
Situation
Accuride Corporation designs, manufactures, and distributes components for trucks, trailers, military vehicles, and construction vehicles. The company’s products include wheels, wheel-end components and assemblies, truck body and chassis parts, seating assemblies, and other commercial vehicle components, which Accuride markets under the brands Accuride Wheels, Gunite, Imperial, Bostrom, Fabco, and Brillion.
Accuride exchanges information with its trading partners using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Prior to 2007, Accuride used a software package from Inovis, which ran on an IBM iSeries, to provide those EDI capabilities. All maintenance of EDI capabilities was done on the iSeries, which validated and processed EDI messages received from trading partners before passing them to the company’s Infor Business Planning and Control System (BPCS) enterprise resource planning application, which also ran on the iSeries. Although the solution enabled Accuride to integrate electronically with key trading partners, it also presented several drawbacks:
n Invalid or incomplete data. Incoming EDI messages were often inaccurate, with missing part numbers or invalid part combinations. IT staff had to intervene to resolve such issues, and all troubleshooting had to be done on the iSeries.
n High costs. The cost of supporting the EDI solution was steep—in part because incoming files were large and were transmitted through a value-added network.
n Difficult changes. Changes to the EDI system, such as defining custom business rules or adding support for new trading partners, took several hours to implement and presented additional risk to an already fragile platform.
In looking to ease its integration pains, Accuride decided to start with the production-sequencing process, in which customers send EDI 866 documents that specify howitems ordered are to be assembled, stacked, and shipped. “We rely on the content in EDI 866 messages for information that the factory floor needs for just-in-time fulfillment of orders,” says David Stefanich, Chief Information Officer at Accuride. “Problems with those messages could result in production downtime.”
However, Accuride had to do more than just solve its integration challenges. The company had acquired an Assemblies-on-Time (AOT) facility at which Accuride wheels are joined with tires, valve stems, and other components to create finished wheel assemblies. It needed a new production-scheduling application to support the migration of the AOT facility to BPCS, which didn’t include the needed production-scheduling functionality. In addition, Accuride had to provide customers that rely on those facilities with visibility into the status of orders, inventory levels, and shipments.
“What we really needed was a comprehensive application platform, with rich integration capabilities being only one key requirement,” says Stefanich. “We also had to deliver a new scheduling system and expose the data in multiple systems for access over the Web. We knew that our existing iSeries wasn’t a viable platform on which to meet such needs.”
Solution
Accuride selected a comprehensive application platform based on Microsoft® software, which enabled the company to build a solution meeting its needs. Developed in only four months, the solution consists of four main components:
n A service bus that validates incoming EDI messages, orchestrates corrections to those messages, and moves data in and out of the company’s production-planning and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This component is based on Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 R2, the second release of BizTalk Server 2006.
n An intranet site based on Windows® SharePoint® Services. The site hosts Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 forms that make it easy for business users to correct any errors in incoming EDI messages.
n A scheduling application that production planners use to fine-tune production schedules after the EDI messages are received and validated. The scheduling application is based on Microsoft ASP.NET.
n An extranet site, also based on Microsoft ASP.NET, that exposes data in BizTalk Server, the scheduling application, and the ERP system for access by customers over the Web.
All four components were developed usingthe Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Professional development system, run on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, and use Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software for data storage and reporting.
Choosing an Application Platform
In selecting an application platform, Accuride desired a single programming environment with which it could build solution components. Ideally, the environment would not only meet technical requirements, but would do so in a way that enabled the company to take advantage of its existing IT infrastructure and skill set. “We wanted to build and maintain the solution in-house,” says Stefanich. “It’s for that reason that we dismissed hosting part of the solution with an outside company. By doing so, we eliminated a significant base fee, plus avoided the future fees associated with adding each new trading partner to the solution.”
Accuride also examined whether it could meet its needs using an Inovis product but determined that the iSeries application could not even support its core integration requirements. “We knew that the best design was to convert incoming EDI messages—and other formats that customers might choose to send—into a common, XML-based canonical format for processing, which also aligns with Automotive Industry Action Group standards,” says Stefanich. “However, the software we originally looked at could only output comma-delimited files.”
Because integration capabilities would be key to the new solution, Accuride spent a good deal of time evaluating BizTalk Server 2006 R2, the component of the Microsoft application platform that supports integration and business process orchestration. Capabilities of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 that the company found attractive included:
n Loose coupling. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 supports a flexible, loosely coupled approach to integration, which simplifies how messages are transformed, processed, and ultimately passed on to other systems.
n Adapter framework. The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 adapter framework provided prebuilt plug-ins for integrating with most other systems—in a manner that wouldn’t require extensive custom development.
n Native EDI support. The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 mapper, which is used to specify how incoming and outgoing messages are transformed, includes native support for common EDI documents. Developers can generate transformation maps just by selecting the appropriate EDI document and using the mapper’s graphical interface to specify how those messages are converted to a canonical, XML-based internal format.
n Reliability and scalability. The publish/subscribe model used by BizTalk Server 2006 R2—in which messages to be acted upon are stored in a common message box—provides a high degree of reliability. Similarly, the host-based architecture of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 enables an organization to scale the solution easily as EDI traffic grows, just by adding servers.
In the end, Accuride chose Microsoft software because it met technical requirements and would enable rapid solution delivery through the ability to take advantage of existing IT infrastructure and developer skills. Furthermore, it was the most cost-effective of all options considered. “The Microsoft application platform met our technical requirements and provided the best fit with our existing technology base, application portfolio, and IT skills,” says Stefanich. “We did an architecture review and cost analysis, and Microsoft came out the clear winner.”
Development Process and Timeline
Development of the solution started in June 2007. To assist with the implementation of BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Accuride enlisted the aid of MPS Partners, a leading provider of business process management solutions based on Microsoft software and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. “We chose MPS Partners for both their deep expertise with BizTalk Server and functional EDI knowledge,” says Stefanich. “With their assistance, we were able to complete the integration component of our solution in only eight weeks.”
Adds Chris Kabat, Director of Connected Business Systems at MPS Partners and a member of the Microsoft BizTalk Server Virtual Technical Specialist Team, “It was perfect alignment from both a people and a product standpoint. Similar architectural views were shared by both companies. Specifically, taking a service-oriented approach using BizTalk Server not only helped us rapidly build a robust solution, but really helped us build an advanced platform to implement Accuride’s future vision for IT.”
Development of all solution components was completed by August 2007. The solution went live on September 3, and currently supports the company’s AOT facility. “Our new solution is streamlining the current production of our wheel assemblies,” says Katie Magoteaux, General Manager of the Accuride AOT facility. “When the market picks back up and our production levels dramatically increase, we look forward to added advantages and increased efficiencies that will be realized as a result of this solution.”
Integration Flow
Figure 1 (next page) shows how Accuride is using BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to support the production-sequencing process—the first of many such EDI transactions it plans to support. Each transaction passes three stages of processing (receipt, validation, anddelivery), which are loosely coupled to facilitate ease of maintenance, changes, and future enhancements.
Receipt. On the perimeter, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is used to receive EDI documents from partners and transform them to a canonical form. In the production-sequencing scenario, this entails retrieving two EDI X12 866 documents (summary and detail) from a file share, combining them into a single, canonical, XML-formatted message, and transmitting an EDI 997 acknowledgment message. “The transformation of EDI messages to a canonical XML format is where BizTalk Server really shines,” says Matt Dewig, Manager of Web Applications at Accuride. “We originally planned to use a different application for this function but found that BizTalk Server was better fit for our business situation.”
Validation. Transformed messages are validated through a set of global and trading partner–specific rules, which are implemented using a combination of the BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine and Web services. If the solution detects errors, it uses the BizTalk adapter for Windows SharePoint Services to route the canonical documents to a SharePoint document library. Windows SharePoint Services alerts business users when such a message is detected, at which time the business users can use Office InfoPath forms to view and modify the data in the message. BizTalk Server watches the document library for such modified messages and, when one is detected, picks it up and revalidates it.
“Because it was difficult to track down errors in the past, we added a validation step that validates incoming EDI documents and, if necessary, enables nontechnical users to repair and resubmit them,” says Dewig. “As we were designing the validation flows, we realized that other types of EDI transactions had similar problems, so the process was made generic enough to extend to other EDI transaction sets.”
Delivery. Validated messages are then delivered to the appropriate back-end systems. In the case of production-sequencing documents, BizTalk Server places the documents in the SQL Server 2005–based database that supports the scheduling application.
Scheduling Application
The company’s new production-scheduling application, which was built by a single developer, is an ASP.NET application that is hosted on Internet Information Services version 6.0, the Web server built into Windows Server 2003, and uses SQL Server 2005 as its data store. The Web site was developed using the C# development language and makes use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming techniques to improve UI responsiveness.
After BizTalk Server places the information from the 866 messages (which are received the day before those orders are to be produced) into the scheduling application’s database, production planners use the application to fine-tune the next day’s production schedules, making any adjustments needed to account for out-of-stock parts or other issues. BizTalk Server watches for those changes, retrieves the modified data from the database, and uses the BizTalk Adapter for IBM DB2 to insert the data into the DB2 database that supports the company’s BPCS ERP system running on the mainframe.