Manufacturing Business Technology

• Trade document control system lightens the load on goods-shipment processes
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2005
  Costly delays in global shipments due to trade document snafus may be a thing of the past for those who adopt supply chain infrastructure provider GT Nexus' new global document control system, called eDocs. The Web-hosted solution streamlines the long string of documentation that must accompany goods moving from offshore manufacturer to export broker, third-party carrier, import ...
  
• Infor buys process-specific PLM vendor, Formation Systems; BEA extends portal line with Plumtree
  
  By Staff, October 1, 2005
  Adding breadth to its process manufacturing group solution in August with the acquisition of product life-cycle management (PLM) vendor Formation Systems, midmarket enterprise systems vendor Infor set forth on its fourth acquisition of the year, and the 14th since its founding in 2001. "The process PLM market is still evolving, but our process customers indicated they wanted a PL...
  
• BreconRidge gains flexibility along with MES traceability
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  A "big bang" manufacturing execution system (MES) deployment can be a risky proposition. An MES is tasked with managing production and recording as-built history—i.e., it's at the heart of what manufacturers do. But when Nortel sold its microelectronics group to BreconRidge, the newly formed manufacturing solutions group needed to get off of its legacy MES as quickly as possible.
  
• Distributors extend their range with Web-based functionality linked to back-end systems
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  "We make our living selling, but we make our money moving material," says Clarence Martin, CEO and CFO of State Electric Supply Co., Huntington, West Va., which sells everything from residential light switches to power-generation transformers and components for automation control equipment.
  
• Sizable 52-site ERP upgrade yields lessons in document management
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  When Luxembourg-based Actaris Metering Systems was spun off in 2001 from global oil & gas services giant Schlumberger, the first order of business for CIO Gustavo Civantos was streamlining IT operations. That meant upgrading a QADMFG/PRO ERP system in place since the early 1990s. Over that time, seven versions of the system—and more than 6,500 customizations—had b...
  
• Compliance, real-time requirements drive MES adoption
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  The venerable manufacturing execution system (MES) market has finally topped the $1-billion mark, a barrier it hovered under for years, according to Boston-based AMR Research. The requirements driving the growth, however, aren't limited to the traditional needs of tracking work-in-process (WIP).
  
• Pivotal uses Ross Systems tie, vertical CRM, to target manufacturers
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  Customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Pivotal counts hundreds of manufacturers in its installed base, but sees a couple of new factors further pushing its solutions into manufacturing. These include being a sister company to Ross Systems, an ERP vendor focused on process manufacturers, and Pivotal's medical-device industry edition.
  
• Color measurement supplier paints online-sales projections sky blue using product configuration software
  
  By Jim Fulcher, contributing editor, September 1, 2005
  "Our products are technical, and involve numerous options, so we wanted to make it easy for customers to configure products and place orders online," says Murphy Keeley, director of global sales operations at X-Rite, a color measurement solutions supplier with U.S. headquarters in Grandville, Mich.
  
• Performance management suite gives optical products maker laserlike business view
  
  By Jim Fulcher, contributing editor, September 1, 2005
  Spectra-Physicscan't compromise on product quality, but it still has to keep a lid on production costs. The key to succeeding with this delicate balancing act is generating and monitoring reports on all production processes. Initially this was a problem, says Mark Rowell, IT director for the Mountain View, Calif.
  
• ERP-like solution fosters C-level control of absenteeism issues
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  "Once you've optimized the supply chain and enterprise resource allocation, the largest expense a company has left is labor, at 30 percent to 60 percent," says Kronos' Director of Product Marketing, Clay Ritchey. "Cut that cost a few percent, and you've reduced your overall cost structure.
  
• Why should a company source goods and services from overseas?
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  An evolutionary change has taken place in the pricing of products and services, says Boston-based Aberdeen Group in a new report, Low-cost country sourcing success strategies. Buyers expect the prices they pay to decline each year, even if energy-related and other costs are rising. To reduce the cost of procured goods, supply management executives are turning to low-cost count...
  
• Performance initiatives must be more than skin deep
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  Six Sigma sits alongside corporate organization realignment as a top initiative for 2005, especially among companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. But the flip side to this is more than 40 percent of executives recently surveyed say performance improvement initiatives failed to achieve strategic business and financial objectives over the last three years.
  
• Survey says CEO to take on yet one more direct report
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  A survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit for SAP reveals that purchasing is starting to be viewed as a more strategic function, but "it's still not a fast track for senior management," says Faheem Ahmed, product marketing manager for mySAP SRM. Because supplier relationship management (SRM) is the fastest-growing part of SAP's business, the enterprise vendor wants to understa...
  
• Sourcing vendors say acquisitions aim at one-stop data cleansing and analysis
  
  By Malcolm Wheatley, senior contributing editor, September 1, 2005
  Materials procurement was supposed to be among the first business processes to be transformed by the Internet. Vendors even created a catchy name—strategic sourcing—for what was billed as a revolutionary method of cutting procurement costs. Yet while Internet-based business processes have become commonplace, most industry experts argue that strategic sourcing has not ...
  
• New market dynamics get storage vendors' competitive juices flowing
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  Sun Microsystems spends $4.1 billion to buy StorageTek. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison invests $150 million in Pillar Data Systems. And Hewlett-Packard(HP) announces a major expansion of its StorageWorks product line. The inescapable conclusion: storage suddenly is hot. For years, the buzz in the hardware business has been around servers—their fast processing speeds, dynamic mem...
  
• Controlling information storage costs may be in the CARDs
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  At some point, "The information you're storing becomes less important than the price you're paying to store it," contends Michael Croy, director of business continuity solutions at IT management consultancy Forsythe, Skokie, Ill. For many companies, that time could be arriving soon as the amount of data created and stored every year grows exponentially, along with demands for leg...
  
• A $100-billion market makes peace with IBM; flirts with open source
  
  By Tony Baer, senior contributing editor, September 1, 2005
  The theme of this year's JavaOne conference was the tenth anniversary of Java. Given the circumstances, and rightfully so, Sun Microsystems wasn't shy about tooting its own horn. The size of the global Java market is now $100 billion; the development community numbers 4.5 million; and this year, the number of Java clients on mobile devices such as cell phones surpassed those on con...
  
• Alphabet soup: JavaOne spotlights Enterprise Service Bus
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  The emergence of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was a highlight at this year's JavaOne conference. On the heels of the Java Community Process' (JCP) formal approval of Java Business Integration (JBI), a standard specifying the functions of an ESB, Sun Microsystems and TIBCOannounced plans to release JBI-compliant products over the next year.
  
• Free configuration services target the data-collection novice
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  To encourage more small and medium-size businesses to adopt automated data collection, terminal emulator middleware vendor Connectis offering free presale configuration services for implementing radio-frequency (RF) data collection solutions on IBM infrastructures. Automated data gathering "puts the responsibility for entering data directly on the person nearest the data," says Conn...
  
• Cognex, Lockheed Martin partner for DoD-mandated coding compliance
  
  By Staff, September 1, 2005
  Machine vision technology vendor Cognex says a partnership with Lockheed Martin will bring defense contractors an integrated solution to meet Department of Defense (DoD)-required unique identification, or UID. The DoD says any equipment it purchases with a value greater than $5,000—or that requires serialization—be marked with a 2D matrix code that uniquely identifie...