On June 22, 2005, SAP announced the purchase of Lighthammer Software Development Corporation. The acquisition extends SAP’s strategy of enabling adaptive business networks, or ABNs. Lighthammer's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) undoes the disconnect between the shop floor and the balance of the enterprise, providing manufacturing performance management & execution. The Lighthammer products provide real-time visibility of manufacturing exceptions and performance variances, including data about causal factors and business impacts, enabling manufacturers to respond rapidly to unforeseen events. The SAP-Lighthammer combination provides the vehicle to deliver real-time transactional integration between ERP and plant floor systems as well as to provide to managers needed performance analytics, visualization and workflow. This acquisition is an important step in improving the management of manufacturing across multiple plants and operations in that it unifies all systems and standardizes all KPIs. Ventana Research believes this is an important step for SAP in providing significantly improved operational performance management capabilities to its manufacturing and supply chain customers. Because of their complexity and cost, these sorts of solutions have been neglected in organizations' overall performance improvement initiatives. Ventana Research believes organizations looking for multi-plant or multi-operation monitoring and management solutions should evaluate this offering. It offers a flexible path to an integrated solution and provides a tool that will help companies understand, align and improve the efficiency of their manufacturing operations.
About Ventana Research
Ventana Research is the preeminent research and advisory services firm helping our clients maximize stakeholder value with Performance Management throughout their organizations. Putting research in a business and IT context we provide insight and education on the best practices, methodologies and technologies that enable our clients to leverage assets to understand, optimize, and align strategies and processes to meet their goals and objectives.
© 2005 Ventana Research
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