SAP eyes the plant with dashboard solution

The knock on SAP's enterprise software from some competitors is that while SAP excels at the corporate level, it doesn't do well at the plant level. SAP executives are aware of this criticism, but call it off base, pointing to the many companies using SAP's manufacturing modules.

Now SAP has another means of deflecting such criticisms: a portal-based plant intelligence offering called the SAP Plant Manager Dashboard. Sudipta Bhattacharya, VP of manufacturing solutions for SAP, says the dashboard is built on SAP's NetWeaver integration technology, and connects with lower-level sources of plant data to give executives a view of shop-floor trends.

"With the supply chain becoming lean, the factory becomes the de facto response buffer to address variability in the supply chain," he says. "Thus, management needs to be able to look into the factory, and make a connection between operations and financial management."

Inventory levels typically are watched closely, says Bhattacharya, but less well understood is how effectively factory assets are being used, and how this correlates to costs and other factors. The dashboard, he says, "gives business context to things that happen on the shop floor."

The dashboard supports workflows, such as passing information on machine downtime to planners. Additionally, the dashboard offers 70 different plant-metric options that SAP developed after talking with 40 of its manufacturing customers.

Where does the dashboard leave vendors such as Lighthammer Software, or OSIsoft—both of which offer Web-based plant intelligence applications and often have joint customers with SAP? According to Bhattacharya, the dashboard is built on an open platform so that existing plant intelligence solutions could be made part of it. For vendors that have built their solutions to link with NetWeaver, says Bhattacharya, the integration is easier.

The dashboard has drawn positive comments from Dedham, Mass.-based analyst firm ARC Advisory Group. In a research note, ARC states, "SAP is delivering a solution that can integrate existing systems to provide a single view of the plant. They also are delivering a clear message that they can and will compete at the plant-floor level."

SAP already is working on a dashboard for production supervisors, Bhattacharya says. There should be strong interest for the dashboards, he sums up, because, "The factory can't continue to operate as a black box."