Level 2 - Make, Buy or... Revamp!

I'd like to talk about L2 apps for steel-makers, briefly:
- In the last 15 years the rolling technology hasn't changed a lot
- Steel-makers have invested a lot of time, money and effort in improving and maintaining L2 analytical model (which usually run on obsolete systems).
- Often the analytical model is fine-tuned but it's a strong issue to integrate it with the business requirements (from L3 or L4) because usually the ICT platform is obsolete.

There is a trade-off:
- Buy a new L2 system, but you need to tune again the mathematical model (causing drop and delay in the production).
- Make a new system, but you need strong technical skill on ICT technologies (and the real business value of the developers is the process knowledge, they should not be diverted from programming languages, operating systems and all these kind of "sexy" stuff)
- There is another approach which is the revamping using an existing solution framework, our approach is described in this white-paper (the Sunsetting Methodology).

Any comments is well-accepted!
We presented an abstract from the white paper at the AIST conference in Indianapolis (May 2007).

The Blog and the world of industrial applications

Following the AIST conference of Indianapolis (http://www.aist.org/convexpo/2007_program_wednesday.htm) I decided to create a blog to keep in touch with customers, partners and anybody else would like to share experiences on industrial and manufacturing software applications.

From my personal experience I think that in the world of ISA-95 (from L1 to L4 apps) there is a lot of room for innovation integrating widespread adopted ICT technologies (.Net, Sharepoint, BizTalk, OLAP systems and obviously portals).

I'd like to discuss here new classes of applications which could be developed going beyond the boundary and definition of ISA-95 standard, integrating information, metadata and datamart which usually are prerogative of only one level.