What happens if an IT landscape grows and no one tends to it? It becomes cluttered, difficult to maintain, and prone to disruptions. Just like a garden that is full of possibilities, but quickly runs wild without proper care.
Many manufacturing companies are facing a similar reality: Systems have been developed at different locations and, over the years, they have grown and expanded into a patchwork of manufacturing IT with multiple system versions, update methods, and isolated monitoring solutions.
Typical consequences:
- Updates are manually deployed one by one making them vulnerable to errors.
- No clear overview: What statuses do the different systems have? What is running? What is not?
- Generic IT tools are used for monitoring that do not account for the specific requirements of a production-oriented system landscape.
- Systems do not support audits because transport paths and decisions are not documented.
- Errors are detected too late and can jeopardize production in the worst case.
In other words: The landscape is growing too fast to be properly maintained.
More transparency, less risk
System Landscape Management is the landscape gardener that transforms this overgrown wilderness into an organized, well-maintained, and sound IT landscape.
The tool has been designed to centrally control, monitor, and track complex system landscapes based on MPDV’s Manufacturing Integration Platform (MIP) with applications like MES HYDRA and APS FEDRA being operated on it: without external tools, without workarounds, and without manual juggling.
The idea behind it all is simple: a central place to manage everything in the system landscape.
System Landscape Management: Benefits
- Central update deployment – secure and standardized: Updates no longer need to be copied to each system separately. Instead, they are deployed in a structured manner via defined transport paths with release stages and complete history. The transfer from the test environment to the production system thus becomes a secure and reliable standard process.
- Full transparency for all systems: System Landscape Management shows online/offline statuses, component statuses, resource usage, and recently installed updates for all systems. Errors are now detected immediately rather than at random.
- Early warning system instead of damage control: Malfunctions in the MIP system landscape are detected early on before they become critical thanks to integrated monitoring. This is a huge benefit, in particular for production-related IT: less downtimes, less risk, less stress.
- Audit-proof traceability: Which updates were deployed, when, and to which systems? Who has released the updates? What has failed? Everything is documented automatically – clearly, centrally, and available at any time.
- Increased productivity for IT & production: No more manual deployment. Less costs. Reduced sources of error. The entire IT landscape is running more reliably.
There are numerous tools available for monitoring and software deployment in traditional IT environments. With System Landscape Management, a needs-oriented, specialized solution is now available for distributed MIP-based system landscapes featuring applications such as MES HYDRA or APS FEDRA.
MPDV’s System Landscape Management…
- factors in update-critical production systems.
- includes release and transport logics for MIP systems.
- is suitable for audits.
- is directly embedded in the MIP environment.
- combines monitoring and update management.
This is why System Landscape Management stands out in the world of manufacturing IT. It truly is a game changer for multi-site, multi-system, and multi-release environments.
IT landscape – from wilderness to flourishing growth
A good landscape gardener takes care that everything grows, which is intended to grow, and that nothing gets out of hand. The job is to create structure before chaos sets in. As a result, everything is well-organized, transparent, and a healthy balance is maintained.
This is exactly what System Landscape Management does for manufacturing IT:
- It facilitates updates.
- It increases system transparency.
- It makes processes more reliable
- And it helps transform a complex IT landscape back into a controlled, well-serviced, and productive environment.
As in landscape gardening, MPDV’s System Landscape Management ensures that manufacturing IT does not become overgrown but instead grows and flourishes.