As part of Orchestrator Week 2019, representatives from Sal Cisne and Vmax Systems got together for a panel to discuss Orchestrator use cases. Sal Cisne’s Orchestrator customer story helps other customers see the value, challenges, and use cases that Orchestrator can provide to organizations. The panel included:
- Wilker Costa, Sal Cisne
- Eduardo Galhardi, Sal Cisne
- Marcel Rodrigues, Vmax Systems
During the panel, Sal Cisne talked about their first orchestration, their current orchestrations, the learning curve with complexity and times, professional profile and skills, benefits, and their JD Edwards environments.
Sal Cisne’s Orchestrator Customer Story
About Refinaria Nacional De Sal
Refinaria Nacional De Sal, established in 1949, is the largest salt producer for human consumption in Brazil. The company serves 3,000 customers to date through the brands of Sal Cisne and Sal Clipper. In order to produce over 240,000 tons of salt per year, the company utilizes a workforce of 550 employees. Refinaria Nacional De Sal has a plant in Cabo Frio City, headquarters in São Paulo City, office support in Rio de Janeiro City, and warehouses in the Cabo Frio City plant and in São Paulo City.
Refinaria Nacional De Sal’s current JD Edwards Environment includes:
- On-premise JD Edwards
- Applications 9.2
- Tools 9.2.3.4
- AIS Server 9.2.3.4
- IoT Orchestrator 7.3.1.0
- Oracle Database 12c
- WebLogic 12.2.1.3
Sal Cisne’s Orchestrator Experience
Refinaria Nacional De Sal began working with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Orchestrator in 2016. In 2016, the company started a new project called ADA (Automated Data Acquisition Project). The purpose of the project was to control devices and machines and get data from the manufacturing processes to use in the work order completion process. Orchestrations were needed to support the main process. With Orchestrator, they are able to make it a single process to control and manage manufacturing processes, and the process is now 100 percent automated.
Due to business requirements, the ADA Project was made with three distinct environments:
- Orchestrator
- Java
- Machines/readers
With JD Edwards, Refinaria Nacional De Sal created and scheduled a new work order. Orchestrator would send the work order parameters, and then JAVA would translate the work order parameters into machine language. From there, the language was sent to the machines/readers, which produced and printed a QR code. The QR code contains all of the information about the product being produced (work order, product code, product lot, package ID, date, time, etc.). The system reads the QR code to get data, which will be recorded in local mode and sent back to JD Edwards through Orchestrator.
Each pallet produced will be identified with a label, which is printed by the system and identified by a sequenced number. The QR code gets read from the pallet label to update the status. The QR code will be read from the pallet label again before its final storage in the warehouse. The work order completion process will then be performed using all of the data recorded along the process. There is no manual data entry in any process phase.
Other Current Orchestrations at Refinaria Nacional De Sal
The image below shows current orchestrations that are either planned, under construction, or working at Refinaria Nacional De Sal and within JD Edwards in general:
Orchestrator Complexity and Learning Curve
There are several aspects to consider when looking at orchestrations, including their complexity and the learning curve related to each. The chart below shows the complexity and learning curve time that Refinaria Nacional De Sal assigned to different types of orchestrations:
Orchestrations that stem from applications inside JD Edwards have a low complexity level and fairly short learning curve timeframe. As you move away from JD Edwards and toward getting and reading data from machines and devices, the complexity level moves up to medium, and the learning curve timeframe increases to roughly three weeks. Updating and inserting data into an external database moves the orchestration complexity level up to high, and the learning curve timeframe extends to six to eight weeks.
It’s important to remember is that the complexity of the tasks depends on your business needs. Even very complex orchestrations take much less time to develop than other types of automation and integration tools. Business analysts require basic knowledge of JD Edwards and its functions to create and perform simple orchestrations. When supported by a developer (JAVA and Groovy), business analysts are also able to create medium and high complexity orchestrations. Depending on skills and experience, it is possible to reduce the development time from days to hours.
Benefits of Using Orchestrator
During this Orchestrator customer story, Sal Cisne expressed that there are countless benefits of utilizing orchestrations within a business. Some of the benefits cited include:
- Maximizing JD Edwards investments
- A new pattern of systems integration
- Low cost to manage and perform maintenance
- Monitoring, failures notifications, and less management for operation
- Applicable in different needs and services – machines, devices, files, systems, etc.
- Easy to use
To learn more about Sal Cisne’s Orchestrator customer story, check out the video and additional resources attached below. To access all of the recordings from Orchestrator Week, visit the Orchestrator Week landing page.