What is The Perfect Plant?
Part One - It Takes an Ecosystem
By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.
SAP’s recent announcement that it will acquire manufacturing execution systems (MES) vendor Visiprise is another important step taken by SAP in its ongoing ‘Perfect Plant’ program, and proof-positive that attaining perfection in today’s high-speed, high-pressure world of manufacturing requires many players and technologies across a complex, globally disperse ecosystem working together in tight unison.
Acquiring Visiprise furthers SAP’s ability to bring together for its manufacturing customers the real-time environment of the plant and the transactional environment of business systems, but it is important to remember that SAP’s Perfect Plant is not (and never will be) a standalone solution. Rather, in the words of SAP senior director of industry solutions Paul Boris, SAP’s Perfect Plant is "a portfolio of products ringed by delivery partners, ISVs, and system integrators."
In this two-part article, I will first look at the key technologies central to SAP’s evolving Perfect Plant program. Part two will examine the equally vital human element -- the evolving roles of CIOs, CFOs, plant engineers, plant managers, and IT staff -- both internal talent and external consultant expertise.
While it might be argued that SAP’s Perfect Plant initiative began in 2005 with the acquisition of Lighthammer, it must always be remembered that streamlining and automating business processes for manufacturing companies has been a core focus for SAP for 30 years. From Lighthammer to Visiprise -- with Factory Logic in between, SAP has strategically and methodically partnered with ISVs and acquired key vendors of plant-level solutions that bolster the company’s Perfect Plant portfolio.
SAP’s Lighthammer buy, however, does stand out as a notable SAP Perfect Plant milestone. This solution quickly evolved into SAP’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence composite application (xMII), and is today known as SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application.
Because it is built on the SAP NetWeaver enterprise-SOA business process platform, SAP MII serves as a plant-level integration hub for core enterprise transactional systems -- including SAP ERP and the full host of SAP Business Suite applications, and a diverse array of plant-level applications, ranging from manufacturing execution to supply chain execution to industry-specific plant-floor functionality applications.
In short, with SAP MII and NetWeaver, SAP has given manufacturers both a linchpin application and an enterprise architectural model for achieving true end-to-end manufacturing.
The addition of Visiprise, according to SAP, and corroborated by numerous industry analysts, provides manufacturing customers “network-wide visibility, enterprise orchestration, plant-to-network data integration and the ability to deploy end-to-end, “plan-to-make” processes across multiple plants through an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) solution from a single partner.”
In addition to SAP MII and Visiprise, additional SAP plant-level applications central to its Perfect Plant program include SAP xLPO for lean planning and operations and SAP VIP for visual information about plants (among many others).
In line with its ongoing commitment to the Perfect Plant and underscoring the essential need for an ecosystem of like-minded partners, SAP launched in September 2007 the SAP Perfect Plant Center of Excellence at its U.S. headquarters in Newtown Square, PA., a simulated plant environment for showcasing SAP manufacturing applications and partner composite applications working together.
A selection (by no means exhaustive) of SAP Perfect Plant partners include:
- Acsis -- delivers automated data capture and serialization track-and-trace solutions for SAP ERP and NetWeaver environments
- Werum Software & Systems -- MES provider for the pharmaceutical industry for compliant shop-floor manufacturing and electronic batch records infrastructure
- NRX -- asset information management solution addresses data migration, rapid hand-off of capital equipment operating details from builder to owner, and completing and commissioning of capital products
- Meridium -- solution that captures and aggregates asset performance data, and provides analyses to decision makers
- Stratus Technologies -- Fault-tolerant, high-availability server systems
Moving forward, manufacturers can expect SAP to aggressively and strategically build out its portfolio of Perfect Plant solutions and grow its ecosystem of ISV and consulting partners. Perfection, albeit noble, is at bottom an ideal, and is nearly always unattainable in the real world. The quest for perfection in manufacturing, however, is a competitive necessity – enabled by an impressive, growing portfolio of SAP technology.
