How To Plan an Integration Between Tulip and an MES or ERP
  • 22 Jan 2024
  • 5 Minutes to read
  • Contributors

How To Plan an Integration Between Tulip and an MES or ERP


Article Summary

Learn which questions you need to ask in order to determine the best way to integrate with your MES/ERP

Tulip has integrated with a variety of MES and ERP systems.

However, since there are many ERP and MES products on the market, it is difficult to say how easily Tulip can connect to your particular ERP or MES. It depends on:

  • The ERP/MES product itself
  • The complexity of your company’s IT environment
  • Your IT team’s capabilities around working with the ERP/MES system
NOTE

In this example, we focus on an ERP or MES system, but this information is applicable to most software systems including CRM, QMS, LMS, and BOM management systems.

Questionnaire

Many customers find that they are able to take the information in this article alone and build an integration themselves. Should you want help from Tulip with an integration to a service, providing answers to these questions is the first step to a successful project.

Strategy Questions

1- What is the goal of the integration?

It's important to establish early on what the short-term and long-term goals for the project are. Do you need all information shared between two systems? Or does it make more sense to focus in on a few high-value exchanges at first?

2- Who are the key stakeholders within your organization

Who is the end-customer for this integration? Who is most familiar with the service to which you would like Tulip to connect? Who will be able to organize access to the service?

3- What documentation does your service provide?

Many enterprise software customers provide documentation for their services only to paying customers. This means that Tulip will not be able to access this documentation. Obtaining access to as much documentation about your software helps scope the work required for an integration.

4- What transactions need to be made between Tulip and the service to be successful?

Here we try to be very specific. Some examples are:

  • Get information about a work order given a work order ID.
  • Mark a work order as completed given a work order ID.
  • Find all of the open work orders assigned to a station given a station ID.

5- Who will maintain this integration?

As new use cases are uncovered, who in your organization will be tasked with being the subject-matter expert for the integration? In some organizations, this is a 3rd party integrator or contractor.

Technical Questions

In order to determine the details of an integration, here are some questions that can guide the process:

  1. Does your ERP/MES have an API?
  2. If your ERP/MES is sending data to a SQL database, can a third party connect to that SQL database? And if so, what privileges can it have?
  3. Does your ERP/MES send data via any industrial protocol, like OPC?
  4. Can the ERP/MES be accessed from the cloud?

Tulip vs. ERP Systems - Assumed Systems of Record (Sources of Truth)

Our recommended best practice is to interact with an object's (e.g. Workorder's) system of record in real-time (typically via HTTP Connector Functions in JSON format).
Below is a comparison of ERP systems and Tulip, and generally for what common items each system is assumed to be the system of record.
Tulip vs ERP - assumed systems of record.png

Connection Background

Generally, Tulip connects to external software systems via one of three methods:

  1. HTTP API (which includes REST and SOAP)
  2. OPC UA
  3. SQL queries

HTTP API

If your ERP/MES has an HTTP (including REST and SOAP) API, Tulip can initiate requests that can send or retrieve data through those endpoints. Tulip, with its HTTP connectors, can consume the web services exposed by an ERP system and bring the data within Tulip to be consumed by applications in real time.

Note that Tulip will need to initiate the connection as opposed to your ERP/MES when using Tulip Connectors. If the ERP/MES needs to initiate the connection to Tulip, use the Tulip Tables API

You may be able to configure the API from the administrator interface of your system. This information will be available on the software provider’s website.

SQL Database

If your ERP/MES is sharing data with a SQL database, then Tulip can also access that database and share data. This may require you to write some new queries within your ERP/MES in order to access the new data from Tulip.

If the SQL database is strictly deployed on-premises, then Tulip can deploy a Connector Host on-premises that allows the database to work with Tulip’s cloud platform.

Additionally, some organizations store their ERP/MES data in a sensitive database that is not accessible to third parties, but they still want to share data with Tulip. So, they set up a new database where they can share specific data from their software systems, and Tulip can share data without any security concerns.

Industrial Protocols

If your ERP/MES shares data via an industrial protocol, like Modbus, MTConnect and OPC UA, then Tulip can connect via a server that is running the Tulip Connector Host.

In this case, your ERP/MES will be acting like a "machine" within Tulip. Check out our Introduction to Machine Monitoring article for more details.

One-Way Data Sharing

Some ERP/MES systems have built-in methods for taking in data from external systems, but it is difficult to send their own data into other systems.

If this is the case, you may need to choose whether one-way data transfer is acceptable or if you want to invest more time and energy into finding a way to make two-way data transfer possible.

For example, you may be satisfied with making Tulip your primary system for collecting data on the shop floor. Then, after sending the data into your MES/ERP system, you can align shop floor data with the existing data in the system.

Example: NetSuite

Let’s say that you use NetSuite as an ERP, and you want to know whether it can connect to Tulip. You can search “Netsuite api” on Google and you will find this page that describes SuiteTalk, NetSuite’s tool for integrating with third parties.

Here’s what SuiteTalk does:

It looks like SuiteTalk allows you to build an HTTP API, so this would be the simplest way to integrate it with Tulip.

You can either create the endpoints yourself within the administrator portal for your MES/ERP, or work with a Tulip Partner that can create the endpoints for you.

Here's an example of how to build a Tulip-NetSuite integration


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You can also head to community.tulip.co to post your question or see if others have faced a similar question!


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