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The evolution of enterprise services is changing the approach for enabling Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) business processes. Enabling systems are migrating to process- and service-oriented solutions. In particular, the paper demonstrates how the new technologies can be used to enable a critical process that links vehicle health maintenance to PLM. Our hypothesis is that Condition-based Maintenance (CBM) and PLM integration is achievable through composite application design. The key process for linking CBM to PLM must convert prognostic and diagnostic information into actionable information that can be directed into a project-level PLM environment that supports the end-to-end product improvement process. To test this hypothesis, we designed a composite application within the context of a Small Business Innovative Research project that is sponsored by the US government. This paper motivates the problem from the strategic level to the implementation level and describes the successful test of the hypothesis.

A number of commercial software vendors sell supply chain software suites that cover essentially all needs of the enterprise. For example, a vendor’s product can handle everything from creating an order, to logistics planning for that order, to logistics execution of that order, and finally to financial settlement. Allowing a single software suite to enable all supply chain-related transactions has some significant benefits including reduced integration costs, improved data integrity, and increased process optimization; however, the reality is that many organizations explicitly choose not to perform all of their transactions in a single software suite. Instead, supply chain processes are almost always executed across a heterogeneous system landscape, often involving communications among systems that were not designed to communicate with each other. Akin to the system landscape decision is the decision of how to implement business processes. There are some business processes in which no competitive advantage is gained from “doing things your own way”; for example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software has optimized the processing of payroll to the point where a customized payroll process probably will not give you much of an edge over the non-customized competition. However, there are other business processes where innovation can provide a competitive advantage; for example, in the 1980s Wal-Mart enhanced its logistics operations with crossdocking and gained an operational advantage over other retailers. Process innovation is widely acknowledged as a means of increasing business value (Davenport, 1992). In such cases, a single unmodified commercial software product might not support the customized process, and the question becomes how to best develop a solution supporting the customized process while keeping interfacing and interface maintenance costs under control. In recent years, a number of enterprise software vendors have put forward offerings in the genre we call “Model-to-Execution.” These offerings provide a viable means of designing and implementing custom solutions in a manner that is economical in terms of both implementation and maintenance costs. We begin by presenting our hypothesis and briefly introducing the concept of Model-toExecution. We then discuss the case study that is used to test the hypothesis and the solution that was designed and implemented via Model-to-Execution. Finally, we describe the benefits of Model-to-Execution for organizations and discuss some of our lessons learned from testing the hypothesis.

The evolution of Enterprise Services is changing the approach for enabling Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). Enabling systems are migrating to process- and service-oriented solutions, requiring new approaches for architecting composite applications. This paper uses examples from our work to present the state-of-the art in architecting end-to-end solutions for delivering PLM and SCM capabilities from an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to the customer. The paper also demonstrates how emerging methodologies, methods, and tools are used to support the implementation of composite applications, as well as the limitations of working in a mixed legacy/modern environment during the lengthy transition period to the new service-oriented computing paradigm. The hypothesis of this paper is that design and supply chain integration is achievable through composite application design, development, and deployment. This paper discusses the design, development, and deployment of a composite application to address the product improvement process for military vehicles, and it lays the foundation for testing the hypothesis. Based on these initial analyses we conclude that the composite approach to PLM is not only feasible, but may provide the only practical solution (given current technologies) to a very complex supply chain information sharing problem.Copyright © 2008 by ASME and U.S. Government