Awards in the presence of greatness

Invistics has its second grant—$500,000 Phase II-B—from the National Science Foundation (the first one was in 2001, to conduct optimization algorithms R&D with MIT and Georgia Tech). Scott Geller, president and CEO of Invistics, says the company's FlowPath manufacturing performance management solution answers the questions, How am I doing?, How good could I be doing?, and How do I get there? Says Geller of the grant, "The monies will go toward a 12-month project to advance ... optimization algorithms for manufacturing excellence."

Among the winners of Pittsburgh-based Supply-Chain Council's multicategory "Excellence" awards" was Aspen Technology, for an app it developed for Swift & Co.'s beef processing operations. AspenTech received the 2004 Technology Excellence award.

Rockwell Automation says all five of its Technical Support Centers have achieved Support Center Practices (SCP) Certification, a hefty process that requires onsite audits and alignment with more than 100 SCP-defined business elements that quantify customer-support effectiveness. Rockwell has centers in the U.S. (Ohio); Brazil; Australia; Germany; and the U.K, with 255 engineers serving 50,000+ customers.

ESYNC Principal John Hill will serve as vice chairman of the Material Handling Institute Board of Governors, 2004-05. ESYNC offers RFID deployment and systems integration services for supply chain initiatives.

Glovia International, a subsidiary of Fujitsu, has a new president and CEO: Yuji Nakasu. It would seem a natural for a Japan-based ERP supplier to be looking at opportunities in the wide-open Chinese market, and Nakasu confirmed many Japanese manufacturers, including Panasonic and Pioneer, are running Glovia in their plants in China. Expected soon from Glovia is functionality that combines the best of Japanese and American methodologies for lean manufacturing.

Shared R&D and sales opportunities were big drivers behind a wave of deals that turned up in March. Among them:

• Datalogic, an RFID systems supplier, will take a $1.3-million minority stake in Alien Technology Corp., an RFID label company. Datalogic, through its subsidiary EMS, will develop readers and antennas for the RFID labels.
• Cisco Systems will buy Riverhead Networks—a security vendor that protects enterprise and service provider networks from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks—for nearly $39 million.
• Enterprise vendor Agilisys bought Varial Software, a German company with financial and human resources software. Varial claims 30,000+ users in manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and public administration.
• Supply chain execution vendor Provia aligned with its parent company, Viastore Systems, a storage & retrieval/material handling company, to develop a single-source RFID hardware/software solution to meet labeling mandates.
• Aras Corp. joined IBM's ISV Advantage Initiative to bring real-time project portfolio coordination, engineering change, and manufacturing quality operations apps to the small and medium-size business market. Aras applications will deploy on IBM WebSphere Internet infrastructure software running on Linux.