It is not surprising that most of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers today from the manufacturing industry use a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system to design their products and manage the product lifecycle. For manufacturers, maintaining smooth and streamlined business operations gets extremely crucial to enhance your business efficiency. However, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and PLM are two entirely different systems with different functionalities.
Using them separately results in disconnected business processes that can lead to costly errors, inefficient supply chains, and unhappy customers. With the new ECM add-in, Microsoft is bringing the ERP side closer to the PLM side as STAEDEAN has done with Product engineering before. Here are 5 pitfalls of not integrating PLM with ERP systems. Therefore, the right way forward is to perform a PLM-ERP integration to improve supply chain agility and reduce costs.
At STAEDEAN, we have been helping our customers achieve the best levels of integration for over a decade now, and we understand the significance of seamless integration between their PLM and ERP systems. Today, we see that the customer is not looking at whether or not they should be integrating—they consider it a necessity. The real questions they have are:
The answer to these questions is simple—a recognized out-of-the-box PLM integration! Why? It is the easiest and the most efficient way of achieving integration. We have seen that out-of-the-box integration solutions can help you get started quickly and without any need for heavy, technical coding. Example: Siemens Teamcenter and PTC Windchill, the two commonly used PLM systems.
In this blog, I will help you understand how we are supporting our customers to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 using our PLM integration framework.
PLM is different from ERP, and they both serve entirely different purposes. PLM focuses on the engineering aspects and supports the creation of products and related data. On the other hand, ERP focuses on logistics and finance and mainly supports the production and procurement processes. In short, PLM is product-focused, and ERP is process-focused.
So, how do you integrate these two different worlds? This is where the PLM integration framework and the ECM add-in come into play.
The PLM integration framework is a configurable integration tool that runs inside Dynamics 365. The engine of this framework is the Business Integration Solutions (BIS). This is the de facto standard for configuring integrations between your Dynamics 365 and other systems. BIS will make sure that your data is automatically imported into staging tables.
When creating or updating product data from your staging tables, many decisions must be made, such as:
The PLM integration framework helps you answer these questions by using an easy-to-configure setup. For Siemens Teamcenter and PTC Windchill, the PLM integration solution is out-of-the-box, which means it has already been set up. For other PLM, CAD, or PDM systems we provide a generic pre-defined setup. This setup can easily be user-adjusted according to the needs of the individual customer.
The integration supports sharing data from PLM to Dynamics 365 which is capable of supporting the data due to the ECM add-in. This includes:
Part data
Revision data
Product status
Product structure data
Product documents
Attributes
Engineering change information
More data will be included in the future.
The use of a PLM system differs from one company to another. Therefore, its integration with Dynamics 365 must be very flexible to be able to meet their unique needs.
Keeping that in mind, we created a solution that:
From our experience with many clients, we have created out-of-the-box integrations for PTC Windchill and Siemens Teamcenter using the PLM integration framework.
We follow the integration standards as set by PTC and Siemens. This means that we use the ERP connector for PTC Windchill and the Teamcenter Gateway for Enterprise Applications (T4EA) for Siemens Teamcenter. We are also working on offering more out-of-the-box integrations with other PLM systems in the future.
In addition, for integrating with systems other than PTC Windchill or Siemens Teamcenter, a generic integration has been created. This integration can be configured to meet the unique needs of customers.
It is clear, by now, that relying on a proven technology is the better way forward instead of reinventing the wheel yourself.
Here are some more short- and long-term disadvantages of building a custom integration:
It takes many months and a team of developers to create the first workable integration
It will delay your D365 project because a robust integration is key to the success of your D365 implementation
Keeping up with Microsoft’s continuous update policy means revisiting, updating, testing, and adjusting your integration on a very regular basis
With over a decade’s experience in integrating PLM systems into Dynamics, we have been helping customers achieve all their PLM integration goals. We have a dedicated team that continuously updates and improves the PLM integration framework and the out-of-the-box integrations. We understand the needs of our customers and work together with them to keep the framework up to date and offer the most suitable solution.