Legacy systems interactions with the supply chain through the C2NET cloud-based platform

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) represents the highest level of the manufacturing systems according to ISA-95 standard. It includes supply chain management, and customer-manufacturer-supplier interactions, essential to a successful business relationship in the frame of Industry 4.0. Many research efforts are being put in place to follows the latest ICT advances, combining them with manufacturing systems technologies. In this manner, the C2NET factories of future project (c2net-project.eu) has been put in place to provide a cloud-based collaborative network for supply chain interactions. This research paper focuses on providing a solution for retrieving ERP data via a Legacy System Hub, which is powered by the previous PlantCockpit project (www.tut.fi/plantcockpit-os/) outcomes. This solution allows the C2NET users to transfer the ERP data from the company side to the C2NET platform via the Data Collection Framework (DCF). Thus, the contribution of this research work is a generic solution that enables the interaction between systems owned by different organizations involved in the same supply chain. As C2NET targets the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), three data adapters are developed for MS Excel, SQL and RESTful data sources. The result of this research enhances the users experience in terms of interface and it might help in the C2NET databases for controlling and monitoring the instance changes in the ERP data on the company side.