Aptean is an ERP company with various industry-focused financial and supply chain solutions in the manufacturing market. Aptean Made2Manage ERP is an end-to-end enterprise resource management solution for manufacturers in dynamic “to-order” and mixed-mode environments. Our customers with Made2Manage typically start with a spare parts integration to support the maintenance teams using CloudDISPATCH.
Below is a list of general use cases for integration with ERP systems like Made2Manage. This information contains the general workflow and best practices we have discovered working with our customers.
General ERP Use Cases:
- Spares / Inventory Management
- Asset Management
- Master Data Management
- Allocation of Labor & Spares Costs from Shop Floor Activities
- Production Orders and Status
Supported Versions Details:
We support the recent versions of Made2Manage.
Integration Methods and Best Practices:
General Considerations
When it comes to Made2Manage, L2L CloudDISPATCH integration API endpoints and use cases are well known and documented. Depending on your specific Made2Manage spare parts reservations, ordering, receiving, and issuing procedures you will likely need to customize the business logic when taking data from the L2L CloudDISPATCH API and pushing it to Made2Manage. Made2Manage allows for customizations that meet industry and company-specific policies, requirements, and regulations. Based on this you should plan on customizing and tailoring our best practices to fit your needs.
Connectivity Options
Made2Manage is a VB.Net based application that resides on top of the Microsoft SQL Server database. You have a couple of options for integration with Made2Manage. It provides a Web API that is RESTful running CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) database operations. It exposes virtually all of the business logic of Made2Manage, allowing your system administrators or developers to create custom reporting solutions, integrate Made2Manage with other enterprise systems, and more – all while adhering to Made2Manage’s business rules and master control settings.
Alternatively, you can access the backend database directly. This is easily done for one-way integrations where data is flowing out of Made2Manage into CloudDISPATCH. Care should be taken to avoid bypassing business rules if you plan to use this method for writing data into the database. It's possible, and for older installations of Made2Manage, it might be your best option. We have a reference implementation in the L2L Integration Server that can serve as a ready-made solution or a starting point for your own implementation.
For more information on these methods please review the following links:
https://www.aptean.com/assets/resources/data-sheets/Aptean-Made2Manage-Datasheet-Web-API-en.pdf
In our experience, customers have either a middleware solution or existing IDOC integrations and experience and prefer to go with what they know. We have a reference IDOC implementation as part of our L2L Integration server. Please contact support for more information on the L2L Integration Server.
Middleware Solutions
Depending on your established Made2Manage integration standards, instead of using the L2L Integration Server Made2Manage interface, you might develop this integration using an existing middleware solution. Since Made2Made has a RESTful API you use the standard REST API connectors to connect the two systems together:
https://help.boomi.com/bundle/connectors/page/r-atm-HTTP_Client_connector.html
https://docs.mulesoft.com/mule-runtime/3.9/publishing-and-consuming-apis-with-mule
https://success.jitterbit.com/display/DOC/Connecting+to+a+REST+API
L2L Integration Server
We provide a reference implementation for Made2Manage integrations as part of the L2L Integration Server. The L2L Integration Server is an on-premise java application with a number of pre-built ERP integrations, including Made2Manage. The L2L Integration Server runs behind your corporate firewall on a Linux or Windows host. It performs synchronization between your L2L CloudDISPATCH Instance and your Made2Manage deployment using a database connection. You may need to customize the integration to fit your company-specific use cases, policies, and procedures. We provide the L2L Integration Server with the java source code so you can easily extend and expand the functionality as you need. For more information regarding the L2L Integration Server, please contact support.
L2L API Code Examples
You might be asking yourself, I'm technical, can't I just do this myself? YES! Based on how easy it is to use our API, a lot of customers jump right in and write custom Made2Manage integrations using the tools, programming languages, and platforms they are most comfortable with. If this is you, we've created a number of API code examples in all of the most popular programming languages. Check out our Github repository at:
https://github.com/leading2lean
Related Articles:
- Spares API Integration Workflow
- Integration Options and Best Practices
- L2L Integration Overview and Architecture Diagrams