Integration tools keep tyre firm trucking

We are probably saving 80–90% of the time it would have been taken us to develop [our own] systems, and we are also adding a great amount of reliability." So says Fabio Gloria, business intelligence project co-ordinator at Trelleborg Wheel Systems, part of the $2bn Swedish Trelleborg group. He's talking about the company's choice of a JDBC (Java database connectivity) integration system from Sunopsis that's now linking plants around the world, and providing the infrastructure for production management and analysis. Wheel Systems, based in Tivoli, Italy, makes everything to do with wheels for forest and farm machines, fork-lifts etc. Beyond its own products, the company also owns the Pirelli Agricultural Tyres brand, and has five plants on three continents and sales offices in 19 countries – so it's very international and very distributed. Which is both its strength and the root of its most recent challenges – getting visibility of data to improve customer service and support as well as plant performance and consistency of operations. Initially, Gloria embarked on a project to monitor plant production performance. Dubbed 'Tableau de Bord', it was about establishing a business management dashboard. Data had to be collected from multiple sources – five IBM AS/400 servers in Sweden, Denmark, the US and Sri Lanka, each running different releases of Intentia ERP, as well as the local Microsoft-based production management systems. The dashboard, hosted in Tivoli, was to be a data warehousing application based on a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database cluster running on Windows 2000 servers, with a MicroStrategy analysis and reporting front-end. "To extract data, we were looking for a data integration solution that would not only support our current architecture, but other systems and configurations, and bring us flexibility," says Gloria, pointing out that the company wants to trial freeware like MySQL and Linux. "We tried several solutions, but ODBC was unreliable and kept timing out, especially on our slow lines to Sri Lanka, and other products required costly proprietary connectors to our ERP system." Then Trelleborg came across Sunopsis. "Its distributed Java-based architecture was a perfect fit," he explains. "We were able to connect immediately to all our data sources without programming." Not only is JDBC a much lighter protocol more easily supported on the company's bandwidth-limited country connections, but also Sunopsis' system creates SQL triggers that transfer only changed data. "That's critical for us," he says. "Sunopsis automatically detects changes in the source databases." And with four of the plants now live on the dashboard (the other is going through a Microsoft Navision ERP implementation), these features have also enabled the company to move onto another key project – effectively integrating production management globally and bypassing the existing local SQL workarounds. As production orders are created by admin staff on Intentia in Sweden, for example, data needs to be transferred to the remote plant NT-based production system in Tivoli, while work in progress (WIP) data needs to be propagated both ways. Says Gloria: "We need to push data as it is modified, and ... we need an end-to-end commit of the transaction to guarantee no data gets lost due to connection failures." Hence again Sunopsis. "Every two minutes the system looks for data that has been changed and transfers it to SQL. Then the Tivoli production system can see what has happened and drive action. The next step is to read the AS/400 direct, bypassing SQL Server."