News
Airbus selects IBM and OATSystems for World’s largest RFID-enabled Manufacturing initiative
April 2008 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
IBM and OATSystems announced that Airbus has selected them to provide a software solution for a multi-million dollar, multi-year RFID project that will help streamline Airbus’s supply chain and manufacturing operations and significantly reduce its aircraft production and maintenance costs. The project represents the manufacturing industry’s single largest RFID software transaction to date.
Using a solution comprised of software from IBM and OAT, Airbus’ objective is to error-proof and automate its supply chain and manufacturing operations. The company selected IBM and OAT for the project following exhaustive research and pilot testing over the past year.
The IBM/OAT solution runs on IBM’s RFID infrastructure, which is powered by service oriented architecture technology that includes the IBM WebSphere Premises Server and the IBM Business Process Management portfolio, including WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Business Monitor. The IBM Tivoli Monitoring and IBM Tivoli Composite Application software products will be used for infrastructure monitoring. The solution will use OATSystems’ business applications including the OAT Foundation Suite, Asset Tracking and Work-in-Process solutions.
Using IBM’s scaleable software and OATSystems’ production-ready solutions, Airbus will be able to integrate RFID into existing applications easily and quickly, transform and streamline current business processes and gain real-time visibility into daily operations. Most important, IBM and OAT’s flexible architecture enables it to distribute computing to devices such as RFID readers, handheld devices, servers or any combination of those. Using this solution, Airbus will be able to deploy applications centrally at its distributed facilities, or even at remote third-party sites to address specific business scenarios.
IBM and OAT will be making their solution available to Airbus’ suppliers and customers, so that they can benefit from the same RFID advantages.
