Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) are an essential core of modern corporate management and administration. The larger the company and the more complex its products, the more complex the tasks and processes in ERP. Corresponding systems are equipped with numerous tools for different areas of application. This requires experienced specialists.

Engineering also has its specialists who know their systems very well. For optimum process reliability and data consistency, ERP and engineering must work together seamlessly. Whether material master, parts list, document or project management: both areas are always involved and must be able to rely on up-to-date data. However, data transfers, duplicate data maintenance and the specialist knowledge often required for the respective non-specialist system are major hurdles.

Standard for the exchange of specialized knowledge

Aucotec has developed the ERP/PLM Integration Platform for EB to significantly simplify the exchange of knowledge with optimum data quality. It does not require any special ERP/PLM know-how from the engineering user. On the one hand, the platform can be docked to any company's own middleware, but in cooperation with the ERP experts from Aucotec's partner It-motive and their data hub Imap, it also offers all-round standardized integration for SAP, Windchill and TeamCenter. The interface always remains the same on the EB side, regardless of which ERP system is connected. This significantly reduces integration and maintenance costs: from setup to implementation and configuration, around half the usual time for ERP integrations can be saved.

From the material master to project management, absolute consistency is guaranteed for configurable, regular and bidirectional data exchange - without multiple entries and update effort. The ERP/PLM Integration Platform is service-oriented. All communication between the systems can run in the background via web services, EB does not have to be started separately at the workstation. In this way, time-based automatisms can be defined to ensure that ERP/PLM and engineering data is always up-to-date. The entire exchange process can also be controlled with EB's Workflow Assistant so that nothing can be forgotten or overlooked.