This option had many flaws, however. Among these was the fact that exception handling of SAP errors had to be conducted by the shop-floor application. So we decided to alter our infrastructure design by introducing an EAI tool. The client was Windows NT 4.0-based and developed using Microsoft's Foundation Classes. Server application components were made up mostly of Oracle stored procedures on the Solaris platform.
Manufacturing plants operate ar-ound the world, seven days a week, every week.
In our evaluation of platform integration products, we looked for connectivity across heterogeneous hardware, operating system, and application platforms. We therefore preferred the ability to publish-subscribe messages even though it was not absolutely required at the time. SAP's EAI architecture built around Application Link Enabling technology is mostly suited for asynchronous transaction processing needs. We would either need to build a custom application connector for SAP or look for vendor that offered a prebuilt SAP connector. We would not need a data transformation tool if all parties involved agreed on a data model.