Web Services and EAM Integration

The potential opportunities for Web services in asset management are very evident. The plant floor contains a myriad of applications and technologies from numerous vendors that often function stand-alone to address specific business issues. Unfortunately, these application silos on the plant floor are hindering many key business processes that are designed to ensure optimum asset reliability and availability.

The work management business process usually involves a number of disparate applications and requires the movement of data through each step of the process. A typical work management process might involve a condition monitoring system that identifies a problem and generates an alarm. This alarm would be entered into the EAM system so that a work order could be created. The planning process would then identify labor and material requirements. If material was unavailable, the material requirements would be entered into an ERP system so that the materials could be ordered. The EAM system would have to know whether the items were ordered and expected delivery information. The EAM system would also have to be alerted once the items were actually received so that the work could be scheduled. Once the work was completed, time card information would be entered back into the ERP system for payroll. The number of nodes and manual steps in this process makes it inefficient and time-consuming and also increases the likelihood of a breakdown in communication.

SOA, on the other hand, simplifies the process by eliminating many of these nodes. Web services handle the movement of data from one system to the next in a secure and timely fashion. As business processes change or new applications are introduced, Web services ensures that they can be easily plugged in to support the business process.

Conclusion

SOA and Web services are poised to fundamentally change asset management. Pressured by today's reality of a retiring maintenance workforce and demand for increased productivity improvements, organizations must begin to fully utilize their EAM applications. SOA promises to advance an organization's business processes by making the EAM an integral part of a comprehensive asset management strategy. Integration is the key to this success and SOA is the enabler.

Serving up EAM Integration

Integration is a word that strikes fear in many information technology (IT) organizations. There is no question that integrating systems has created major havoc within enterprises, and gluing together disparate mission-critical business systems from multiple vendors that were never designed to work together is definitely a cause for IT concern.

For many organizations, the solution has been to avoid integrations altogether by selecting a single vendor's complete suite of enterprise applications. Although the intent is not to disparage enterprise applications, the reality is that while they offer application breadth, they may not offer sufficient application depth (depending on your specific needs). The result is a compromise in application functionality in order to satisfy the needs of the broadest number of users.

However, in asset-intensive organizations, this compromise may have dire consequences. All too often, the maintenance department is forgotten and left to use whatever functionality comes along with the rest of the enterprise suite and usually has little input into the selection process. This often results in resistance by the maintenance staff and ineffective use of the enterprise suite. In some situations, the maintenance department may even revert to using inefficient paper-based systems. Thus, these asset-intensive organizations should not ignore the needs of the maintenance department—especially when they're the ones responsible for maintaining the assets that produce the revenue stream.

Fortunately, technology has finally caught up with the needs of the enterprise, and integration is now becoming a business enabler instead of an obstruction. For asset-intensive organizations, this means that a functionally robust best-of-breed enterprise asset management (EAM) system can play a viable and strategic role within the maintenance department by helping to streamline critical business processes. It also means that IT departments do not have to spend 50 percent of their budget supporting complex application integrations, finance gets the information they need, and management has complete visibility across the enterprise.

ASP Traffic Analysis! What Next – ASP Odometers

WebTrends Corporation (NASDAQ: WEBT) is creating a business unit to provide web log analysis on an ASP basis. The new unit will offer its services through a platform called WebTrends Live. A user embeds a small piece of JavaScript code, provided by WebTrends, on every page to be tracked. When a surfer loads such a page the JavaScript sends data back to a WebTrends server farm. Traffic analysis information that includes the page view is available within seconds.

WebTrends Live offers three products. The high-end product is the eCommerce Edition, which can track information from a commerce-enabled site, including revenue by product and the differing behaviors of browsers, first-time buyers, and repeat buyers. The Enterprise Edition offers a full range of traffic analysis capabilities. The Personal Edition is offered free to small web sites that place WebTrends advertising on all pages that are tracked.

Market Impact

We don't foresee any major changes in the marketplace. WebTrends has a well-entrenched leadership position, and will attract customers to this service. But its two major competitors are Microsoft Site Analyst, a part of its Site Server product suite, and various freeware and shareware products. Some Site Analyst customers who would otherwise need a separate server for log analysis might choose WebTrends Live in preference to SiteAnalyst, but not many, we think. As far as freeware and shareware (including home-grown solutions), users who are prone to those solutions make their choices on the basis of features (or philosophy) rather than cost, and are unlikely to move to a commercial product.

WebTrends should capture additional customers through WebTrends Live and will see an increase in market share, but not so much to change the landscape. Microsoft may choose to offer some of the components of SiteServer on an ASP basis if its customers indicate that that would be convenient for them, but we certainly don't believe that such an offering would increase Microsoft's market share against WebTrends.

WebTrends also competes to a small extent with products from companies like Accrue, NetGenesis and SAS. But, again, these products tend to be more specialized, and the companies that use them are unlikely to be fazed by the purchase of an additional server, so there won't be much growth for WebTrends against those products on the basis of an ASP offering.