ManufIT.com

It was announced this week…

http://www.mbtmag.com/article/CA6570888.html?nid=3436&rid=1258896918

SAP to buy Visiprise.  Those of us in the business knew it was coming at some point, and it happened.  What will be really interesting is to see what this does to the relationships SAP has with other key players in the industry like Camstar, Apriso, Wonderware, Rockwell, etc.  All of these companies have some type of technical or strategic relationship with SAP so they can all say they can “connect to SAP with their MES solutions.”

So now what?  It was hard to argue with a customer that says something like “I spent $XXM on SAP to run my business and if I can leverage that investment to help me run my operations better, that is what I am going to do.”  In the mid to long term, it is going to be very hard to convince a company to use a different MES solution other than Visiprise if they are an SAP user.

I have often wondered who is going to “win” in the MES space - ERP or the Automation vendors.  This move would appear to be a swing in the direction of ERP winning the battle for MES.  I have been silent on posts for a while, but this will provide some good thoughts in the upcoming weeks.

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.”