The biggest story in manufacturing in 2009 has obviously been the recession and its effect on demand, production, jobs, and the financial health of industry companies. And one of the effects has surely been much closer scrutiny of IT and automation projects. Most manufacturing companies this year, if they haven’t stretched out, delayed, or outright canceled projects, are demanding that technology investments pay off fast.
This tougher business context has reverberated across the technology spectrum. Growth rates have fallen significantly in many categories of enterprise application software used by manufacturers, even as vendors of these tools continued to bring to market new releases and versions of their products, packed with new features and functions.
In this issue, MA assesses what happened in some of the most important technology categories over the past year — enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, business intelligence, product lifecycle management, manufacturing execution systems, and human capital management — and points to what is likely to occur next year.
The economy may slow, but technology, it seems, never lets up.
What’s Inside the Year in Review
ERP Decisions Ride on Total Cost of Ownership
ERP Expert Q&A with Jim Shepherd, AMR Research
SCM Cost Concerns Trump Spending
SCM Expert Q&A with Tim Hanley, Deloitte
BI Continued to Show Force in 2009