Manufacturing Business Technology articles from September 2005

Manufacturing Business Technology archives from September 2005

Measuring gains and growing pains.(Up front)
September 1, 2005... No matter what kind of gain in manufacturing you're talking about--increased throughput, reduced inventory, or something less tangible--at the end of the day, it should be expressed as a productivity gain, an increase in output per hours...

Infor achieves scale; explicates future focus.(MIDMARKET ERP)
September 1, 2005... From its founding in 2001 until now, enterprise vendor Infor has grown from a concept in search of a market to the largest independent software company serving small and midsize business (SMB). With revenues of $500 million-plus and an...

How midsize ERP vendors fend off newcomers.(Views from the front)
September 1, 2005... Cambridge, Mass. -- based analyst firm Forrester Research says the competing styles of traditional midsize ERP vendors fall into three camps: 1. Organic: Within this group, opportunities exist for vendors to develop strong channel...

NAM endorses Bush Supreme Court nominee.(CORPORATE)
September 1, 2005... In August, The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)--the nation's largest industrial trade association--endorsed the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to fill the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the resignation of Justice Sandra...

SMBs: check SLAs with HP given reorg.(OPERATIONS)
September 1, 2005... Hewlett-Packard's (HP) breakup of its Customer Solutions Group means its customers--especially small and medium businesses (SMBs)--need to reexamine their service-level agreements (SLAs), says Carrel Levy, an analyst with Ontario-based...

SMB market spending big on software, services.(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY)
September 1, 2005... For the past several years, software vendors have been circling the small and medium business (SMB) sector like hungry wolves. A recent survey from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research says there's been good reason for such behavior....

Drive for functionality, market share fuels Q2 consolidation spike.(MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS)
September 1, 2005... Consolidation in the technology sector spiked during second-quarter 2005, with 695 deals totaling $86 billion, according to New York-based The 451 Group, which monitors such transactions. This represents a 15-percent increase over the previous...

Business and IT execs diverge on spending plans.(IT BUYING INTENTIONS)
September 1, 2005... While IT spending expectations remain a full percentage point above U.S. overall growth forecast at 5 percent over the next 12 months--this according to Framingham, Mass.-based IDC's July FutureScan assessment of IT industry indicators and...

Foxboro offers up a "control-room makeover".(PLANT AUTOMATION)
September 1, 2005... Reality television is making its debut in the plant automation world, as Foxboro, an Invensys company, has embarked on a search for the North American control room most in need of a total makeover of its design and equipment. The makeover...

SSA Global buys customer management and HR-related suites.(CRM FOR THE MIDMARKET)
September 1, 2005... In one of its first acquisitions following its initial public offering, SSA Global is beefing up its customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources (HR) capabilities. In early August, SSA announced the intention to buy CRM analytics...

Commission levels fines at increased rate across vast jurisdiction.(PRODUCT SAFETY)
September 1, 2005... The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has been flexing its muscles lately, and all that exercise is costing manufacturers. Since last October, the commission has leveled nearly $10 million in fines, compared with $3.5 million in all of...

Multiple sources cite the good and bad for Sarbanes-Oxley.(REGULATORY ANGST)
September 1, 2005... Overregulation is viewed as the most critical threat to businesses in both developed and developing nations, according to a CEO survey presented at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos. For publicly traded companies doing business in the...

Software consolidation: oversimplistic and wrong.(In perspective)
September 1, 2005... I am making a startling prediction to kick off the post-Labor Day pundit season: there will be more consolidation in the software industry. In fact, current theory states that at the end of the day there will only be a couple of large companies...

Taking the long view on supply chain strategy.(In perspective)
September 1, 2005... A supply chain executive I spoke with recently pointedly summed the gist of the matter this way: another round of incremental change in supply could kill his company. The implication is that the next round of supply upgrades must deliver...

Stand by your brand: after-sales services tops strategy list at Whirlpool.(Cover Story)
September 1, 2005... When Tom Welke thinks back to the days before a new warranty-claims processing system streamlined the interactions between Whirlpool and its thousands of service partners, one issue--waste in the service chain--is top of mind. Welke is VP of...

Build a better mousetrap: find hidden value in business applications without customizing the company into a corner.(Applications & Services)
September 1, 2005... Enterprise systems, if not quite commodities, are not much of a competitive differentiator anymore. They're table stakes in the manufacturing game, and the players to beat now are the ones that have taken those systems to the next level, often...

BreconRidge gains flexibility along with MES traceability.(CASE-IN-POINT)
September 1, 2005... A "big bang" manufacturing execution system (MES) deployment can be a risky proposition. An MES is tasked with managing production and recording as-built history--i.e., it's at the heart of what manufacturers do. But when Nortel sold its...

Distributors extend their range with Web-based functionality linked to back-end systems.(MARKET-DRIVEN STRATEGIES)
September 1, 2005... "We make our living selling, but we make our money moving material," says Clarence Martin, CEO and CFO of State Electric Supply Co., Huntington, West Va., which sells everything from residential light switches to power-generation transformers...

Sizable 52-site ERP upgrade yields lessons in document management.(CASE-IN-POINT)
September 1, 2005... When Luxembourg-based Actaris Metering Systems was spun off in 2001 from global oil & gas services giant Schlumberger, the first order of business for CIO Gustavo Civantos was streamlining IT operations. That meant upgrading a QAD MFG/PRO ERP...

Compliance, real-time requirements drive MES adoption.(MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEMS)
September 1, 2005... The venerable manufacturing execution system (MES) market has finally topped the $1-billion mark, a barrier it hovered under for years, according to Boston-based AMR Research. The requirements driving the growth, however, aren't limited to the...

Pivotal uses Ross Systems tie, vertical CRM, to target manufacturers.(MEDICAL-DEVICE MANAGEMENT)
September 1, 2005... Customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Pivotal counts hundreds of manufacturers in its installed base, but sees a couple of new factors further pushing its solutions into manufacturing. These include being a sister company to Ross...

Color measurement supplier paints online-sates projections sky blue using product configuration software.(CASE-IN-POINT)
September 1, 2005... "Our products are technical, and involve numerous options, so we wanted to make it easy for customers to configure products and place orders online" says Murphy Keeley, director of global sales operations at X-Rite, a color measurement...

Use readily available apps to lift margins through service.(In perspective)
September 1, 2005... Manufacturers are straggling to find high-margin niches where they can continue to compete against low-cost global competitors. Some say services are the answer, particularly for complex or technical products. While margins and prices on...

Outsourcing separates winners and losers: farming out non-core processes pays dividends for those who do it right.(Business Performance)
September 1, 2005... Here's something you may not know about business process outsourcing, or BPO: roughly half the time it fails to deliver the anticipated benefits. That fact, uncovered in a study conducted last year by New York-based McKinsey & Co., raises...

Performance management suite gives optical products maker laserlike business view.(CASE-IN-POINT)
September 1, 2005... Spectra-Physics can't compromise on product quality, but it still has to keep a lid on production costs. The key to succeeding with this delicate balancing act is generating and monitoring reports on all production processes. Initially...

ERP-like solution fosters C-level control of absenteeism issues.(TIME & ATTENDANCE)
September 1, 2005... "Once you've optimized the supply chain and enterprise resource allocation, the largest expense a company has left is labor; at 30 percent to 60 percent," says Kronos' Director of Product Marketing, Clay Ritchey. "Cut that cost a few percent,...

Ask AberdeenGroup: why should a company source goods and services from overseas?
September 1, 2005... An evolutionary change has taken place in the pricing of products and services, says Boston-based Aberdeen Group in a new report, Low-cost country sourcing success strategies. Buyers expect the prices they pay to decline each year, even if...

Performance initiatives must be more than skin deep.(SIX SIGMA)
September 1, 2005... Six Sigma sits alongside corporate organization realignment as a top initiative for 2005, especially among companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. But the flip side to this is more than 40 percent of executives recently surveyed...

Survey says CEO to take on yet one more direct report.(SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT)
September 1, 2005... A survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit for SAP reveals that purchasing is starting to be viewed as a more strategic function, but "it's still not a fast track for senior management," says Faheem Ahmed, product marketing manager for mySAP...

Sourcing vendors say acquisitions aim at one-stop data cleansing and analysis.(SPEND MANAGEMENT)
September 1, 2005... Materials procurement was supposed to be among the first business processes to be transformed by the Internet. Vendors even created a catchy name--strategic sourcing--for what was billed as a revolutionary method of cutting procurement costs....

Just married: integration platforms plus automated mapping systems boost continuous-improvement efforts.(Integration & Infrastructure)
September 1, 2005... Management consultants have long argued that no business process improvement program can succeed without executive support. That's one reason why any effort to continuously improve business performance is substantially aided by executives'...

New market dynamics get storage vendors' competitive juices flowing.(DATA MANAGEMENT)
September 1, 2005... Sun Microsystems spends $4.1 billion to buy StorageTek. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison invests $150 million in Pillar Data Systems. And Hewlett-Packard (HP) announces a major expansion of its StorageWorks product line. The inescapable...

Controlling information storage costs may be in the CARDs.(DATA BACKUP)
September 1, 2005... At some point, "The information you're storing becomes less important than the price you're paying to store it," contends Michael Croy, director of business continuity solutions at IT management consultancy Forsythe, Skokie, Ill. For many...

A $100-billion market makes peace with IBM; flirts with open source.(JAVA'S TENTH ANNIVERSARY)
September 1, 2005... The theme of this year's JavaOne conference was the tenth anniversary of Java. Given the circumstances, and rightfully so, Sun Microsystems wasn't shy about tooting its own horn. The size of the global Java market is now $100 billion; the...

Alphabet soup: JavaOne spotlights Enterprise Service Bus.
September 1, 2005... The emergence of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was a highlight at this year's JavaOne conference. On the heels of the Java Community Process' (JCP) formal approval of Java Business Integration (JBI), a standard specifying the functions of an...

RFID market remains under construction: EPCglobal's Gen 2 standard seems a shoo-in for acceptance, but global agreement on RFID standards is a ways off.(Security/Wireless)
September 1, 2005... Ratification of RFID standards group EPCglobal's Class 1 Generation 2 UHF Air Interface Protocol--Gen 2, for short--has not yet brought RFID vendors and their customers under a single umbrella where interoperability is a given and adoption is...

Enterprise, infrastructure vendors offer up middleware and intelligence apps to gain RFID market entry.
September 1, 2005... As RFID deployments scale from pilot to full production, the processes for transporting and translating RFID data flow to upstream business applications grow more complex as the number of reader points and kinds of devices escalate...

Free configuration services target the data-collection novice.(AUTO ID)
September 1, 2005... To encourage more small and medium-size businesses to adopt automated data collection, terminal emulator middleware vendor Connect is offering free presale configuration services for implementing radio-frequency (RF) data collection solutions...

Cognex, Lockheed Martin partner for DoD-mandated coding compliance.(UNIQUE IDENTIFICATION)
September 1, 2005... Machine vision technology vendor Cognex says a partnership with Lockheed Martin will bring defense contractors an integrated solution to meet Department of Defense (DoD)-required unique identification, or UID. The DoD says any equipment it...

No-frills kits offer starting place for RFID adoption or testing.(COMPLIANCE-LEVEL RFID)
September 1, 2005... Many manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see attitude, or investing only enough in RFID to meet customer requirements, according to a recent survey by Bangalore, India-based InfoSys that found 45 percent of RFID deployments are in response to...

In the technology industry, being big can sometimes get ugly.(Back talk)
September 1, 2005... When hackers send a virus or worm out to attack Microsoft's Windows operating system the entire world hears about it almost immediately. And some people count each event as another reason not to use Windows. These folks--many of them...