We often find promotion of individual application as a solo but rarely see discussion about an enterprise system landscape that requires a team of applications to perform a symphony.
At the PTC Users Global Summit 2024, we presented the subject of Sustainability Integration via Connected Data, where a vision of enterprise system landscape to support sustainability integration for Retail and Manufacturing businesses was panned out. The landscape consists of all of the cloud applications below:
Material Exchange is a cloud application to allow designers and material suppliers to share a cloud space in exchange of available materials to support product design.
First Insight is a marketing platform focusing on getting consumer insight about a product being designed or sampled or manufactured.
VATANA is a cloud platform for digital assets of 3D to support wherever 3D and AR are required in the process of product selling, design and development.
Shopify is an E-Commerce platform for SMBs to open online store front to consumers.
VibeIQ is a visual line planning cloud application to help merchandizing and assortment planning.
Thingworx is an platform of Internet of Things that allows application development, configuration of dashboard and data flow, and connection of devices and systems.
FlexPLM is a PLM platform to streamline product design and development and to support end to end product lifecycle management.
Microsoft 365 or SAP, or any ERP cloud is required to support enterprise resource management covering master product data, finance, sales, purchase and shop floor control, distribution, warehouse and inventory management.
These applications allows communication to each other seamlessly in the cloud through REST API, aka "end points". The set of sustainability related data would get pulled or pushed at the right time through IoT connectivity and flow to support an end to end close loop data flow.
An individual application that dance well in solo may not be a good candidate to an existing enterprise system landscape. Lots of time has been dedicated to discuss what is a right fit to a business condition given option A to Z. But often it becomes a power struggle rather than a decision based on sound principles and evaluation criteria.
For that, an enterprise architect is essential to make sure the right components are secured for a symphony with reasonable budget. He should also make sure a change control process with the right tool be in place to allow backward and forward traceability about what, why and how the changes are applied to the enterprise system landscape.
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