Oracle seen as benefiting in process industry ERP shake-up
By Jim Brown, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2004 7:00:00 AM
Process industries are notorious for breaking the assumptions on which ERP systems are designed and built, but the process ERP market itself isn't immune to the ERP consolidation wave.
Amidst this shake-up (see table), large enterprise suite vendors—including SAP; J.D. Edwards (now owned by PeopleSoft); and Oracle—have been slowly strengthening support for process industries. "Look for continued unrest in the process manufacturing applications market," says Colin Masson, a research director at Boston-based analyst firm AMR Research, "particularly in the midmarket where SAP and Oracle don't have as much penetration, and there is no dominant leader."
Over the past five years, perhaps the most stable vendor with process capabilities has been Oracle. It already was a relatively strong ERP vendor when it acquired process manufacturing applications from DataLogix in 1997. Since that time, the product has been enhanced, rewritten in the Oracle toolset, and further integrated with the rest of Oracle's suite.
Oracle for Process Manufacturing (OPM) boasts functionality to handle complex inventory requirements, including lots, sublots, and multiple units of measure to support a process known as "catch-weight." Catch-weight allows for containers such as cases of meat to carry individual weights in inventory, and is a common example of functionality that discrete systems have difficulty supporting.
Oracle claims more than 500 customers for OPM, with the majority on the current release, Oracle 11i. Oracle has added major customers in the past year, including Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, North Wales, Pa.; and Welch Foods, Concord, Mass.
"OPM sales have grown 130 percent over the past two fiscal years," says Doug Chapman, process solutions director for Oracle. "We've seen particularly strong demand from food and beverage and life sciences companies."
Process ERP moves: select highlights
| Vendor | Market move |
| Adonix | Bought MAI Systems' CIMPRO package. |
| Agilisys | Formerly SCT's process manufacturing unit, the vendor still focuses on process, and also automotive. |
| Invensys | Management of its process ERP business from the Marcam acquisition has been shuffled, but now has a home in the Invensys Production Solutions unit. |
| Ross Systems | Being sold to chinadotcom. |
