Third Party Integrations

e4E system architecture allows itself to integrate with third party systems via web application programming interfaces (APIs). Given that 4E is a cloud (Amazon Web Services) hosted application, it is possible to securely access third party system APIs with minimal effort, to fetch data in near to real-time. This data drives the KPIs defined in 4E, making it easy to measure, analyze and respond to abnormalities swiftly.

Because such integrations are possible for 4E, its customers do not have to move away from their core systems and continue to use them as before, with their regular job functions.

4E supports following third party integrations:

SAP

SAP is the most popular ERP system found in manufacturing organizations that capture large volumes of data across their disparate systems. Data is fed into the ERP through various channels, like manual data entry, process derivatives, automated machine lines, Internet enabled sub-systems or simple Excel files. It requires technical and subject matter expertise to read this data, to decipher, and make deductions that assist further business decision making.

4E in-house expertise makes this happen

4E SAP development team assists in writing ABAP programs which gather essential data from SAP, which your KPIs need to measure performance. OData is the default way to communicate with SAP backend, using such ABAP programs. These OData services are consumed by 4E to read and collect the data and store it within 4E database. Data transformations are possible within the ABAP programs, so that the data read from SAP into 4E has limited volume, in comparison to the raw data that ERP stores.

It is always secure

It is crucial to note that such OData services using ABAP code, do not have WRITE access to SAP. More so, this code ONLY has READ access to those SAP tables within the modules, which the code has permissions for. Furthermore, only 4E data fetch channels are authorized to communicate with these OData services and they are not open to READ for any other applications.

It is always incremental

The 4E data synchronization channel is written in such a manner that it retrieves only data change-sets between a specified duration of date and time. This ensures that OData services always stay high on performance. Upon every call to the OData service by the 4E data synchronization channel, there is absolutely no need to take a download of full data every time (unless specified otherwise). The change-sets are retrieved and aggregated on 4E server keeping the data sanity intact.

SAP integration with 4E

SAP Endpoints

SAP Configurations

SAP Forms

RDBMS

Those manufacturing companies which employ customized software or software which assist their operational excellence, often find themselves with a data footprint residing in common enterprise databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, mySQL or IBM DB2 etc. Such databases could be proprietary in nature which need localized expertise to understand the schema and know how to fetch the data which drive your KPIs. 4E DEVELOPMENT team employs the same approach to integrate with relational databases, and creates OData APIs hosted within customer environment. This serves two strong purposes: 1. It keeps the databases shielded within the organization’s own network 2. It authorizes ONLY 4E data channel to retrieve the data via such OData services.

(More in future releases)

EXCEL FILES

Microsoft Excel is the de-facto industry data manipulation tool. To make data accumulated from non-human interfaces more readable and fathomable, it has to be re-organized, most often manually. Some businesses demand that such data be applied with statistical and/or arithmetic computations to derive indicators which accurately depict significance of a particular business dimension. Unfortunately, Excel files are prone to heavy user customizations, which cause the data to live into multiple disintegrated files, inconsistently formatted, sometimes with multiple users, across multiple geographic locations. Collating such files is always a laborious activity, often prone to unintentional human errors. 4E DEVELOPMENT team helps provide a standardized template, to capture such data and a common location where data suppliers could feed the same. 4E data synchronization channel polls for Excel files residing at a configurable data location and builds the change-sets necessary to aggregate the data within 4E database.

(More in future releases)