Production control is central to the enterprise
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
Historically viewed as a bottom-up automation vendor, Siemens now has a message that resonates well with IT decision makers who traditionally take much more of a top-down view. Likewise, Siemens offers a compelling vision and a credible strategy for achieving its Totally Integrated Architecture (TIA) for connecting the plant floor with the top floor. Not to mention extensive reach in servicing customers anywhere in the world, and delivering the technology necessary to leverage information to make better business decisions.
According to an AMR Research Alert issued in March, from the Boston-based analyst firm and based on interviews with 200 manufacturers worldwide, Siemens is top-of-mind for users among automation and manufacturing execution system (MES) vendors by far—that is, nearly twice its nearest competitor (17 percent versus 9 percent respectively).
Siemens SIMATIC IT serves as the framework for delivering value in the MES space. The company acquired the core functionality—what it terms its SIMATIC IT Production Suite—via its acquisition of Orsi Group, an Italian vendor with an MES product built on Microsoft technology to the ISA 95 standard. Siemens has since expanded this core by adding elements it is bundling as the Simatic IT R&D Suite, and the SIMATIC Manufacturing Intelligence Suite, both built out from acquisitions a few years back of Compex and IndX, respectively.
Simatic IT is evolving to become not just an MES solution, but rather a framework of core manufacturing process elements, on top of which industry-specific application libraries developed by Siemens and its third-party partnerships can be added—comprising a comprehensive SIMATIC IT ecosystem.
