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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Standards organizations are cooperating under initiatives, such as OpenO&M, that allow for sharing information. Such efforts promise to ease application integration for manufacturers. |
Large ERP installations are not unusual these days. So, executives at Suncor Energy Inc., a major producer of oil, gas, and renewable energy sources, took it all in stride when they recently adopted an SAP system in-house. Install and all will be well. Or so they thought. The deployment was a success, but the company soon found out that simply running the enterprise application wasn't enough. "We wound up with a humongous, greatly capable system that wasn't connected to anything real," says Cliff Pedersen, Suncor's manager of product production processes. According to Pedersen, the company's SAP system was fed by numbers from spreadsheets — which was great for figuring out financials, but not so wonderful when it came to measuring the actual production that generates the business' bottom line. [Click to continue] |