Well, this is now old news, but I figured this was a good thing to make my first post about.
I think that this is step one of the next big trend in MES. The ERP systems out there have already established a stronghold on the business tier in business and really have no-where to go but down towards the plant floor (at least in manufacturing.) Large corporations find the prospect of having all their data in one central place extreamly valuable. We've been preaching that in MES for many years... eliminate islands of data. In most companies, the islands of data have been consolidated down to a few, and in many Manufacturing plants, the two big islands of data are MES and ERP. There have been lots of (and there is still lots of) effort put in to interfacing these two systems together by lots of different vendors and standards bodies such as the World Batch Forum's XML Based B2MML Standard. These standards, used along with tools such as BizTalk are the current technique used to bridge these islands of data... SAP has started the process of the NEW way to do it. Make them all part of one system.
What worries me about this approach is what happens to the smaller manufacturing companies out there. If the big ERP systems slowly buy out the small players, or at least take over the MES space with their own products, the solutions will no longer be affordable for the smaller, single line factories out there. Especially those that are not part of a large corporation. It will be interesting how the market responds as that hole develops...
I think that this is step one of the next big trend in MES. The ERP systems out there have already established a stronghold on the business tier in business and really have no-where to go but down towards the plant floor (at least in manufacturing.) Large corporations find the prospect of having all their data in one central place extreamly valuable. We've been preaching that in MES for many years... eliminate islands of data. In most companies, the islands of data have been consolidated down to a few, and in many Manufacturing plants, the two big islands of data are MES and ERP. There have been lots of (and there is still lots of) effort put in to interfacing these two systems together by lots of different vendors and standards bodies such as the World Batch Forum's XML Based B2MML Standard. These standards, used along with tools such as BizTalk are the current technique used to bridge these islands of data... SAP has started the process of the NEW way to do it. Make them all part of one system.
What worries me about this approach is what happens to the smaller manufacturing companies out there. If the big ERP systems slowly buy out the small players, or at least take over the MES space with their own products, the solutions will no longer be affordable for the smaller, single line factories out there. Especially those that are not part of a large corporation. It will be interesting how the market responds as that hole develops...
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