Realizing ERP’s Untapped Potential

This quick, one-time registration gives you access to members-only site benefits. About one in four said that managing yield across sites was the primary driver. And only four percent of business respondents indicated that visibility into inventory for available-to-promise purposes was the leading motivator for their company’s investment in systems to collect and manage plant-floor data. Despite the danger of data overload, Miklovic believes that more drug companies will either purchase new ERP systems or upgrade existing ones to handle RFID data captured on the plant floor. “RFID is going to drive SAP’s and Oracle’s ERP business because manufacturers need a way to store and access that information,” he says. AMR’s Martin envisions a more gradual transition to newer ERP technology over the next three years — especially when it comes to linking RFID data. The software industry will also be affected by the need for tighter connections between ERP and the plant floor. Just as ERP vendors began to include customer relationship management (CRM) software and advanced planning and scheduling (APS) modules, MES may soon become a module for ERP, Miklovic predicts. “In five years, there will be very few MES companies,” he says. Martin, for one, questions whether that would be a good thing. “ERP is a planning system, and companies need to define a standard integration layer between manufacturing and ERP. They get operations excellence from a manufacturing system, not ERP.” Despite this traditional separation of functions, both MES and ERP software vendors are taking an aggressive approach, each encroaching on the other’s turf and claiming it can perform the other’s functions. “The MES vendors will tell you they can do inventory management and materials management, and the ERP companies will say they can go down and do things on the manufacturing floor,” observes Martin. “Neither of