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Industries · Manufacturing

From shop-floor to trading partner. One integration platform.

Manufacturing runs on integrations no other vertical sees: OPC UA from PLCs, MES orchestrating production, SAP S/4HANA running finance, and X12 / EDIFACT moving 850s and 856s between you and Tier-1 customers. Art2link is the platform that connects all of it — plant by plant, partner by partner, without modernizing your core systems first.

The realities

What integration looks like across a working manufacturing estate.

Reality 01
Three eras live in parallel

PLCs on the floor are from the 90s. MES was installed in the 2010s. ERP just moved to the cloud. They all have to talk to each other every shift.

Reality 02
Customers dictate the EDI

Tier-1 OEMs each publish their own EDI implementation guide. Walmart 856 differs from Target 856 differs from Toyota DELFOR. Your map matrix is your competitive cost.

Reality 03
Plant-to-plant differs

Two plants in the same company run different MES vendors, different SCADA setups, sometimes different ERPs after acquisitions. Standardization is a 10-year journey.

Reality 04
Traceability is law

FDA, FAA, ITAR, automotive recall regulations — full lot/serial traceability across the entire production network is mandatory in most categories.

Production order lifecycle

One production order. Eight systems. Six days of factory floor.

A representative production order moving from customer EDI through scheduling, execution, quality, packing, and shipment. Every transition is a different system; every event is captured under one correlation ID for traceability and recall readiness.

Production order · PO# MFG-2026-44781 · 6,000 units
Tier-1 automotive component
Day 0 · 09:14Order arrives
Customer purchase order received
Customer EDI · AS2
X12 850 · Purchase Order

Tier-1 customer sends 850 over AS2 with MDN. Art2link validates against partner-specific implementation guide, generates 997 functional ack within 15 minutes.

Day 0 · 11:38Planned
Production order created in ERP
SAP S/4HANA · PP
IDoc ORDERS05 · Production order

Art2link routes the parsed EDI into SAP PP via IDoc. Planning run schedules against capacity, material availability is checked against the warehouse, BOM explosion completes.

Day 0 · 14:50Released to floor
Order released to MES
Rockwell FactoryTalk · MES
OPC UA + ISA-95 B2MML

SAP releases the production order down to the MES via Art2link, which translates the SAP IDoc into ISA-95 B2MML format. MES schedules work centers, prints traveler, queues operator instructions.

Day 1 · 06:30Production starts
First-piece inspection passes
Zeiss CMM · Quality system
OPC UA telemetry + LIMS event

First-piece runs through dimensional inspection on the CMM. Results post via OPC UA to the quality system. Art2link aggregates the inspection record against the production order ID for the traceability bundle.

Day 3 · 22:14Run complete
Production run complete
MES · Production reporting
IDoc COPRT5 + per-unit serial

6,000 units complete, 14 scrap, 23 rework. Art2link routes the production confirmation back into SAP and stamps each serial against the lot for downstream recall traceability.

Day 5 · 08:22Packed
Packed and labeled to spec
WMS · SSCC label printing
UCC/EAN-128 · SSCC labels

Pallets packed to customer-specific configuration. SSCC labels generated per pallet via the WMS, correlated to serial numbers, ready for the 856 ASN.

Day 5 · 16:48Shipped
ASN transmitted to customer
Art2link · AS2 partner channel
X12 856 · Advance Ship Notice

856 ASN with full hierarchical loop (shipment / order / pack / item / serial) generated from the production + packing data and sent to the customer over AS2. MDN received within 8 minutes.

Day 6 · 11:05Invoiced
Invoice sent, lot file archived
SAP FI · Art2link · WORM archive
X12 810 · Invoice + traceability bundle

810 Invoice routed to customer. Complete traceability bundle (raw material lots, machine telemetry, inspection records, serials, ASN) archived to WORM storage with 7-year retention for recall + audit.

Everything under one correlation ID (mfg-44781-bundle). One query in the operator UI surfaces every event from the 850 receipt through the 810 invoice — including every machine reading, every quality sample, and every serial. This is what a recall request looks like resolved in 3 minutes instead of 3 weeks.
Plant + enterprise stack

From PLCs on the floor to S/4HANA in the cloud.

Shop floor · OT layer

  • OPC UA Rockwell, Siemens
  • MODBUS TCP legacy PLCs
  • MQTT IIoT sensors
  • EtherNet/IP device-level
  • Historian OSIsoft PI, GE Proficy

MES + execution · Plant systems

  • Rockwell FactoryTalk MES
  • Siemens Opcenter MES
  • GE Proficy Plant Applications
  • Wonderware (AVEVA)
  • iBASEt Solumina (aerospace)
  • SAP ME / DMC

ERP + finance · Enterprise layer

  • SAP S/4HANA · ECC PP, MM, SD, FI
  • Oracle EBS · Fusion Cloud
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O
  • JDE EnterpriseOne
  • QAD Adaptive ERP
  • Plex Smart Manufacturing
Compliance posture

Aligned with what regulators and customer auditors actually look at.

Art2link runs in your Azure subscription — production data, machine telemetry, and trading-partner records never leave your tenant. Audit retention is configurable per integration (7 years typical, longer for aerospace/defense). Customer-specific auditor read-only access supported.

ISO 9001QMS alignment
IATF 16949Automotive QMS
AS9100Aerospace QMS
FDA 21 CFR Part 820Medical device QMS
ITARIf applicable
SOC 2 Type 1In progress
In production

Manufacturing estates already running on Art2link.

A Tier-1 automotive component supplier consolidated EDI integrations with 47 OEMs and SAP S/4HANA integration across 9 plants onto Art2link — reducing partner-specific map maintenance from 3 FTEs to 0.5.

Manufacturing · Tier-1 automotive · 9 plants

A specialty chemical manufacturer replaced 14 point-to-point integrations between OSIsoft PI, MES, and SAP — cutting lot-traceability query time from 2 days to under 5 minutes for FDA recall readiness.

Specialty chemicals · FDA Part 820 workload
Plant integration review

Walk a real production flow with our team.

30 minutes with a senior architect who has shipped in manufacturing. Bring one of your live EDI partners or MES-to-ERP flows; leave with a tailored reference architecture.