Manufacturing Business Technology articles from March 2005

Manufacturing Business Technology archives from March 2005

A bridge from personal productivity to the enterprise.(Up front)
March 1, 2005... When I go to a trade show or conference, it often happens someone asks me what I've seen lately that's new or interesting. Usually my answer is more about current management concepts or industry trends than some specific product technology. ...

Infor buys MAPICS; SAP acquires TomorrowNow.(Market Consolidation)
March 1, 2005... The consolidation of ERP vendors continues, as Infor Global Solutions ended January 2005 by announcing its intent to acquire MAPICS. The all-cash deal is expected to put more than $300 million in the pockets of MAPICS shareholders. While...

NAM wrestling with members' divergent views on global trade.(Manufacturing And Politics)
March 1, 2005... Given his Republican-party contacts, the new president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)--former Michigan Governor John Engler--might have an easier time presenting the group's ideas to President Bush than some of his...

Companies understand the value--and cost--of good employees.(Corporate)
March 1, 2005... While it's sometimes hard to believe--particularly for those who have toiled in high-tech jobs the past few years--most companies still value employees. At least that's the conclusion that can be drawn from results of a recent survey conducted...

China up; Japan up; OEMs down.(Operations)
March 1, 2005... Speaking at DistribuTECH, an automation and technology conference for the utilities industries, Benson Hougland, a VP with industrial automation provider Opto 22, confirms many of Opto 22's manufacturing customers are struggling to keep their...

Be it Linux or UNIX, IBM says, "just buy our servers".(Information Technology)
March 1, 2005... Even as it aggressively promotes the open-source Linux operating system, IBM continues building servers that run IBM's own proprietary version of UNIX. And its newest servers set a glaring example of this technological schizophrenia--giving...

U.S. A-TEAM looks first at the plant floor in collaboration with NIST.(Big Three Auto)
March 1, 2005... The Big Three American automakers--DaimlerChrysler, GM, and Ford--and the U.S. Department of Commerce are looking to collaborate on standards for automation devices as a means to reduce R&D and other costs. The U.S. Council for Automotive...

ABB upgrades 800xA framework using IBM WebSphere.(Plant-Floor Integration)
March 1, 2005... Last year, industrial automation vendor ABB released its 800xA software framework for plant automation and information management, to bring data from disparate plant-floor applications into a single information view. Now the company has taken...

China and India push to compete with divergent approaches.(Global Dominance)
March 1, 2005... The industrialized world has watched in awe as both China and India have undergone phenomenal growth in the last several years: China's rise igniting in the 1980s; India's a decade later. A quarterly report from N.Y.-based consulting firm...

QAD seeks gain from Oracle's technology focus.(Connecting With Lean)
March 1, 2005... Pam Lopker, president of enterprise vendor QAD, says her company, in the wake of Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft, is opening an office in Denver to take advantage of the talent pool to be found around and about what was the headquarters of...

Hardware advances have potential to raise software license costs.(Software And CPU Capacity)
March 1, 2005... Given offshore software development and open-source computing, manufacturers may expect their software licensing costs to track downwards. They could be in for a shock. According to analyst group Gartner, Stamford, Conn., there's a very...

Financial firm ventures into logistics with Vastera acquisition.(Trade Management)
March 1, 2005... The nascent global trade management (GTM) market took an interesting turn with the news that JP Morgan Chase, a $1.1-trillion financial institution, is acquiring global trade logistics management software and services supplier Vastera. The deal...

Will the falling dollar make American software vendors targets?(Mergers & Acquisitions)
March 1, 2005... For the past few years, the dollar has been headed in one direction: down. Since early 2002, it has fallen 24 percent against the yen, and 16 percent against a benchmark index of currencies maintained by the Federal Reserve. The impact of that...

Prescient Systems and The viaLink Company have merged as Prescient Applied Intelligence to deliver Web-enabled solutions that allow business trading partners to collaborate across all elements of the supply chain.
March 1, 2005... Prescient Systems and The viaLink Company have merged as Prescient Applied Intelligence to deliver Web-enabled solutions that allow business trading partners to collaborate across all elements of the supply chain. Combining viaLink's commerce...

Supply chain management vendors Exel and RedPrairie will jointly develop solutions for creating efficient supply chain networks, including inventory control, tracking and tracing, and warehouse and labor management technologies capabilities, as well as multimode visibility, transportation management, and sector-specific materials management.
March 1, 2005... Supply chain management vendors Exel and RedPrairie will jointly develop solutions for creating efficient supply chain networks, including inventory control, tracking and tracing, and warehouse and labor management technologies capabilities, as...

Headwater Technology Solutions has acquired Delfour, a third-party logistics supplier to warehousing facilities.
March 1, 2005... Headwater Technology Solutions has acquired Delfour, a third-party logistics supplier to warehousing facilities. Headwater offers enterprise optimization services based on SAP and Microsoft platforms. "The Delfour purchase allows us to bring...

Supply chain management vendor TECSYS will acquire Application Solutions Inc. (ASI), a warehouse management systems (WMS) provider.
March 1, 2005... Supply chain management vendor TECSYS will acquire Application Solutions Inc. (ASI), a warehouse management systems (WMS) provider. "We are expanding our WMS practice to include the IBM iSeries family, and positioning the company as an early...

Arena Solutions.
March 1, 2005... Product life-cycle management (PLM) vendor Arena Solutions reports a 150-percent increase over fiscal-year 2003 revenues and a record Q4 2004 ended December 31. With 29 customer wins in Q4, "We're not only seeing our solution being used...

Applistructure: hard to say, but of general interest.(In perspective)
March 1, 2005... In many ways, the enterprise applications market has been pretty dull for the past five years. Let's face it: following the emergence of the Web in the mid-1990s and the unconsummated horror of Y2K, what else of note has happened? But...

Demand-driven model embraces product innovation and regulatory compliance.(In perspective)
March 1, 2005... It's still early in 2005, but it seems everyone has come back to work with a vengeance. As a result, I've had plenty of opportunity to discuss short- and long-term thinking about IT with several manufacturing CIOs and supply chain execs. ...

Reality meets radio-frequency identification: radio tagging the supply chain unfolds slowly, but CHEP and others keep eye on business-case goals.(Cover Story)
March 1, 2005... Like most every executive involved in logistics management, Brian Beattie knows the theoretical advantages of radio-frequency identification, or RFID. But unlike many of his peers, Beattie's company is live with a program that leverages RFID...

Plant-floor security, by the numbers: count the ways to secure your plant-floor data, networks, and operations.(Applications & Services)
March 1, 2005... Now that connectivity has come to the plant floor and the old black boxes that powered controllers are giving way to commercial off-the-shelf software, questions about securing data on the plant floor are more pressing than ever. Plant-floor...

Next on the horizon: the bill of process.(Product Life-Cycle Management)
March 1, 2005... Some call it digital manufacturing; others call it manufacturing process management (MPM). Whatever the label, it's a software niche getting more attention given UGS's January deal to buy MPM vendor Tecnomatix Technologies. UGS--known for its...

Johnson Controls levels schedules in a lean manufacturing environment.(Case-In-Point)
March 1, 2005... Johnson Controls, Holland, Mich., had gone as far as it could with its manual lean-scheduling process. Changes in demand forecasts, customer requirements, supplier capacity, and plain old circumstances could tie down a master scheduler anywhere...

Demand-driven model keeps best-of-breed vendors in the black.(Finite Capacity Scheduling)
March 1, 2005... For years it was forbidden by MRP II orthodoxy. Then it became a headliner, given the power of Windows and memory-loaded PCs, only to become passe with the rise of Lean and flow production methodologies, whose apostles proclaimed there was no...

Instrument maker follows the rules to ease complex configurations.(To-Order Manufacturing)
March 1, 2005... The challenge for the sales staff at JEOL USA, a Peabody, Mass.-based maker of microscopes and other instruments, is a particularly common one among manufacturers of engineer- and make-to-order products. They must quickly calculate price and...

Production and the product life cycle.(In perspective)
March 1, 2005... The concept of product life-cycle management (PLM) is broad and far-reaching: provide a coherent view of a product from womb-to-tomb. This means having an accurate view of each product at each revision level, from concept to design to...

Stop saying, "that's what I should've done": real-time performance information helps, but must be carefully filtered for relevance.(Business Performance)
March 1, 2005... In the late 1990s, DaimlerChrysler's MOPAR Parts Division, Centerline, Mich., updated its systems for demand forecasting, dealer demand, global parts ordering, and distribution resources planning. As the sole supplier of parts to dealerships,...

Contract manufacturer turns to PLM supplier for data cleansing solution.(Case-In-Point)
March 1, 2005... On the surface, a contract manufacturer's business model seems simple: it builds products based on specifications its customers provide. It's sort of like using a prepackaged mix to bake a cake, instead of making it from scratch. In...

Crystal reports now a full part of the Business Objects family.(Platform Integration)
March 1, 2005... Business Objects has integrated the reporting capabilities it gained in its 2003 acquisition of Crystal Decisions into the overall Business Objects product line, and users seem pleased with the results. Crystal reporting functionality is...

Intentia aligns with Cognos to bring BI to the midmarket.(Enterprise Performance Management)
March 1, 2005... Business intelligence (BI) isn't just for the Fortune 500. At least that seems to be what Cognos, a supplier of BI software, is saying as it continues to build alliances that call for embedding its technology in ERP systems catering to small...

What makes for best-in-class?(Ask Aberdeen Group)
March 1, 2005... The Manufacturing Performance Management Strategies Benchmark report from Boston-based AberdeenGroup studied more than 175 enterprises in industrial equipment, aerospace & defense, automotive, metals, and other industries to determine what key...

Think outside the box using tools in a box.(Support For Innovation)
March 1, 2005... What's the difference between a good idea and a great idea? And how fast can you find out whether someone already beat you to market with it, albeit good or great? Goldfire Innovator 2.0 from Invention Machine can tell you that, as well as...

MatrixOne.(Business performance in brief)
March 1, 2005... Product life-cycle management vendor MatrixOne announces Materials Compliance Central, a business process application for environmental compliance throughout the product development process. The solution allows users to analyze bill-of-material...

Invistics.(Business performance in brief)
March 1, 2005... Manufacturing performance management vendor Invistics received its second Phase I award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), bringing total grants from the organization to more than $1.2 million. Invistics offers Flow Path Management...

Informance International.(Business performance in brief)
March 1, 2005... Manufacturing performance management vendor Informance International closed $6 million Series B financing in February, led by Cargill Ventures. "Informance provides Cargill and other companies with a diagnostic solution that quickly...

An open question: can open-source software help--or hinder--a manufacturer's IT operations?(Integration & Infrastructure)
March 1, 2005... When it was time to replace his company's primary network server, Joe Drouin, CIO of TRW Automotive, Livonia, Mich., took what many in his position might still consider a huge risk. "I threw out a wild card to the team that was looking at...

Users unconcerned with open-source lawsuits, but welcome "insurance policies".
March 1, 2005... It's every CIO's nightmare. The open-source application that they found works well, and has saved considerable sums of money. But those savings count for nothing against the size of the lawsuit that has just been served, alleging that the...

Sun wants users to see grid technology as a business tool.(Grid Computing)
March 1, 2005... Announcements related to grid computing typically highlight fast transaction speeds and high system utilization rates. While those things may ultimately lead to lower operating costs, it's hard for the average executive to make the connection....

Adobe almost embraces Linux.(Document Management)
March 1, 2005... Adobe, supplier of the Acrobat document publishing program, is experimenting with Linux. And like most technology vendors working with this operating system at this stage, Adobe is finding it makes more sense to support use of the open-source...

Technology, data, relationships underpin successful partner/customer strategies.(Collaborative Supply Chains)
March 1, 2005... Humidity control equipment manufacturer Munters Corp. understands the value of supply chain collaboration. It also understands the potential danger of rushing too quickly into what for many companies remains unfamiliar territory. That's...

Acquisition gives Cisco upper hand in both wired and wireless networking.(Enterprise Networks)
March 1, 2005... Buying out the competition has long been a key component of Cisco Systems' strategy for remaining the leading supplier of equipment for corporate IT networks. And at least one industry analyst believes a recent acquisition will help Cisco...

Microsoft.(Integration and Infrastructure in brief)
March 1, 2005... Microsoft will support adoption of the Interface A standard for the semiconductor industry by developing Microsoft .NET-based architectural guidance that will allow chipmakers, equipment vendors, ISVs, and systems integrators to deliver...

Software Engineering Consultants, a LANSA business partner, says its GTIN Builder--a Windows-based tool for Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) management--eases data aggregation problems that companies face when preparing data for publication to the UCCnet GLOBALregistry (now the GS1 Global Registry).(Integration and Infrastructure in brief)
March 1, 2005... Software Engineering Consultants, a LANSA business partner, says its GTIN Builder--a Windows-based tool for Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) management--eases data aggregation problems that companies face when preparing data for publication to...

RedTail Solutions'.(Integration and Infrastructure in brief)
March 1, 2005... RedTail Solutions' Transaction Manager, an integrated EDI and warehouse management solution, now offers business functionality for AccountMate software users who need the capabilities of EDI combined with low-cost warehouse and inventory...

Bar codes: not dead yet: instead of RFID, Werner and others have confidence in improved scanning, mobile printers.(Security/Wireless)
March 1, 2005... Unless you've been living on another planet, you've caught some of the buzz about RFID--short for radio-frequency identification. But another automatic-identification (auto-ID) technology--the ubiquitous bar code--is still alive and kicking....

Metro Group DC achieves 99-percent tag-read rate using Intermec solutions.(RFID Rollout)
March 1, 2005... The world's third-largest retailer--Duesseldorf-based Metro Group--and bar-code and RFID technologies supplier Intermec Technologies have achieved 99-percent tag read-rate accuracy on more than 50,000 pallets going through Metro's largest...

IBM first in line for trusted I/O device.(Security/Wireless)
March 1, 2005... The Trusted Computing Group, Portland, Ore.--which includes such prominent computing sources as AMD, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, National Semiconductor, and many others--formed in 2003 to forge vendor-neutral standards for trusted...

ZigBee standard could be automation future force.(Plant-Floor Wireless)
March 1, 2005... In December, following two years of development and testing, the ZigBee Alliance announced ratification of the first ZigBee specification for wireless data communications. Shortly thereafter, two alliance members--Chipcon AS, a designer of...

Accu-Sort Systems.
March 1, 2005... Accu-Sort Systems (ASI) reports successful matching of RFID and bar-code data in a sortation system, thereby boosting read performance of a material handling system by using both data points. Existing bar-code applications use a legacy system...

Uniform Code Council (UCC) has certified Liaison Technologies' Content Director UCCnet Services Edition as compliant with UCCnet Data Pool Services subscribers.
March 1, 2005... Uniform Code Council (UCC) has certified Liaison Technologies' Content Director UCCnet Services Edition as compliant with UCCnet Data Pool Services subscribers. Content Director, a product information management solution, supports large product...

FullTilt Solutions.
March 1, 2005... FullTilt Solutions announces Perfect Product Suite 5.0, a product information management and data synchronization solution that maintains all product information and links in a central repository, Data may be output in any format required to...

A&D giant leverages DoD experience in a developer's kit.(RFID Tools)
March 1, 2005... Aerospace & defense (A&D) contractor Northrop Grumman has staked its claim in the rapidly growing RFID space by releasing Illuminos, a developer tool kit for interfaces between popular RFID readers and enterprise systems. The kit is for...

Zebra, SAP and Wavelink simplify secure wireless system management.(Partners For Progress)
March 1, 2005... Integrating RFID, other wireless technologies, and mobile devices with enterprise systems; managing them; and guaranteeing their security can be complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. In response, printer vendor Zebra Technologies is...

Why there's no need to fear China.(Back talk)
March 1, 2005... Just hearing the word China strikes fear--and a certain amount of loathing--in some quarters of both the U.S. manufacturing and high-tech sectors. Those emotions stem from the perception that China, with its giant pool of low-cost labor...