East coast swing 2007

Driven by the prevailing weather pattern, January snow followed me from Chicago to Boston. Moreover, the flight took off from O'Hare International moments after the hometown Bears secured a place in this year's Super Bowl; while soon after it landed at Logan International the New England Patriots lost theirs. The contrast of glee and gloom in similar settings was startling.

It's not news to hear that—besides football fans and research analysts—the Boston area is home to technology and software vendors with a keen interest in manufacturing. Over the course of two days, I met with several of them.

Kronos, with fiscal year revenues fast approaching $600 million, is the leader in workforce management solutions. The increasingly fine-grain development of these solutions can be seen in the company's late January release of "Kronos for Manufacturing." The scope of the solution, according to company VP Stuart Itkin, encompasses "time and labor management, including employee interactions; scheduling solutions, including preferences; activity tracking; for a true sense of actual labor costs and to identify efficiencies; labor analytics; and absence management."

At industrial automation vendor ICONICS, President and CEO Russ Agrusa says his company is "ready for 64-bit computing and integration with Microsoft's Vista operating system and Microsoft Office 2007." No one has ever doubted ICONIC's commitment to the Microsoft technology stack or its being a leader in adopting the latest Microsoft technology for industrial automation.

Using Windows Vista in manufacturing systems, says the company, will improve security, optimize desktops, and enable the mobile workforce, while 64-bit computing will significantly enhance visualization, including 3D graphics and more efficient graphics processing.

Looking ahead to the magazine's April special section on SAP's burgeoning partner ecosystem, several vendors talked about their work with the leading enterprise vendor. In fact, it's difficult to find an applications vendor that isn't trying to figure out how to sell into SAP's installed base. Marketing aside, manufacturers' truly need better information exchange between plant-floor and enterprise systems.

GE Fanuc Automation, a unit of GE Industrial, in October, 2006 announced an agreement with SAP aimed at the automotive and mill-products industries. The combination of GE Fanuc's Production Management solutions with SAP's Production Execution services, says Tom Cruz, GE Fanuc VP of software and services, "can overcome the barriers historically restricting contextual information flow between the plant floor and the enterprise for bi-directional flow of production schedules, quality performance, inventory consumption, and maintenance status."

GE Fanuc says this agreement is SAP's only with an automation vendor focused on automotive.

Finally, Brooks Software is an execution system (MES) vendor with domain expertise that goes back to some of the first systems deployed in semiconductor, the space where the efficacy of comprehensive execution systems was first recognized. Today it also has solutions in life sciences and other verticals.

While it's business as usual at the company, it's waiting for final closing of the agreement under which Brooks Automation will sell Brooks Software, its erstwhile software division, to Applied Materials for $125 million in cash. Issues remaining to be decided include what the new unit will be called.