Supply chain management is critical to the financial success of maunfactuing companies today. The IT challenge is integrating all the different legacy databases and applications with new third party software packages for workflow, scheduling, order management, and Ecommerce.
For Lucent Technologies, the modeling and scheduling software selected was from Adexa. A team of developers were tasked to write interface software that extracted and manipulated data from three Sybase databases and an Oracle datatbase, to feed lot-by-lot scheduling results into a legacy shop floor tracking system. As systems engineers we had the job of molding everyone’s efforts into a cohesive, automatic, supportable, highly available system. This system spanned Sun/Solaris and Compaq/NT computers.
To do this we utilized the Storage Area Network that we had built with multiple Sun and Compaq computers attached to it. Using Veritas Volume Manager to mirror data between two data centers, Legato Enterprise Cluster and its rich perl rules based engine to manage the flow of the various application processes, and a Netscape iPlanet web server front end we brought a cohesive look and feel to a very fragmented underlying set of disparate pieces. Not only is this information system highly available, it is simple to maintain and administer. The operations staff can point and click their way to solving many day-to-day support issues.