Event-driven business process management in Engineer-to-Order supply chains

Integration efforts in today´s manufacturing environments tend to enable service-based communication interfaces between enterprise and manufacturing systems. Constantly changing business conditions demand a high level of flexibility in business processes as well as an adaptive and fully interoperable IT infrastructure. The principles of reusability and loosely-coupled services have driven Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to become the most used paradigm for software design at the business level. In a manufacturing environment, event-driven architectures (EDA) are often employed for managing information flows across different production systems. The timely propagation of business-relevant events is a fundamental requirement in Engineer-to-Order (ETO) enterprises, which require a high level of transparency in their supply chains. Agility is one of the top priorities for ETO manufacturers in order to react to turbulent scenarios. Therefore, the main challenge for ETO supply chains is to identify and propagate events across the ETO logistics network and integrate these into the manufacturer business processes. We present how an existing service-oriented integration platform for manufacturing can be used to fill the gap between EDA-based manufacturing environments of an ETO supply chain and SOA-based manufacturer business processes. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) as vehicle for this integration. The adoption of BPEL will enable an efficient and effective reaction to turbulent manufacturing scenarios in an ETO supply chain.