We were doing a MES requirements and selection engagement for a large Medical Devices company that had just spent A LOT of money on SAP globally. They were determined (as they should be) to give SAP a fair shake on whether it could handle the MES requirements. So the final selection was between SAP and other best of breed MES solution providers. At the time, SAP only had one regulated customer that was using PP/PI for MES.
The customer had Account Managers that were responsible for interfacing between the business and IT. One of them had this famous quote (which is probably only funny if you have been in MES for a while):
“SAP has like 40,000 tables, surely some of them can do MES.”
Funny stuff! By the way…like the ichthus for your bullet lists.
So - I just saw the SAP demo that indicated they have the eDHR and eBR space covered. Is this a new demo? Since we are new to the SAP world I’m not sure. I can’t find any references in all my web crawling of presentations etc. on this approach or capability being actually in use at customers (except one at Prudue Pharma). It throws my MES strategy in a tizzy as I’ve got to go through all the analysis and justification again. What say you Dr. Whitlock! I like the quote by the way.
Mr. Hughes,
Good to hear from you. I don’t know what SAP has directly, but I do know they are building strong partnerships with Wonderware, Visiprise, and smaller companies like Performix.
I do not know of any native SAP functionality that does this well. What I have seen demonstrated is PI Sheets and it is not something you would want to put in front of any operators. I will call you soon.
-scott