10.1 Motives

Due to its great popularity and high degree of standardization SAP has in two regards a special importance among ERP systems on the market. In the first place, developments for an MES vendor in the SAP environment pay off due to the high level of market penetration; Second, SAP is one of the few suppliers in the ERP environment who actively advocates an independent MES system outside mySAP ERP in order to be able to offer their customers vertical integration. It is precisely in the manufacturing environment that a partner concept for so-called manufacturing applications has been massively beefed up since mid-2004: the "adaptive manufacturing" partnership leads all other efforts.

With this initiative and the corresponding publications SAP is clearly demonstrating that for many industries and areas of application the use of an independent MES is to be recommended to allow exploitation of the full functionality of the SAP ERP and logistics solutions. On the SAP side this depends on integration of the MES solutions of the partners.

The idea of integrating an MES system into the ERP world is gaining a new importance at SAP and demands of an MES and thus, of course, of an MES vendor a whole series of interfaces and integration technologies. It is, however, of decisive importance to the SAP user in other words, the manufacturing company using mySAP that he does not lose sight of what is really necessary to secure the quality of the application. Here...