For the past year, Accenture has quietly assembled an industrial automation business that will move the IT consulting and integration company onto the shop floor - an area in which it has never dabbled despite the company's extensive work with manufacturers.
Until recently, Accenture has concentrated solely on enterprise applications, including finance, marketing, and even the supply chain. But business and technology requirements have changed over the years, Accenture says, and manufacturers need an integrated organization that includes the production floor.
Recognizing a gap in its own offering, Accenture acquired ATAN, a 20-year-old, privately held Brazilian company that employs about 450 engineers experienced in industrial IT, automation control, and instrumentation. The addition of ATAN's ranks to Accenture's global infrastructure, which includes about 180,000 people in 49 countries, has inspired the integrator to claim that manufacturers now have a partner that can address their technology needs from the shop floor to the top floor.
The new services are delivered through the Accenture Automation and Industrial Solutions group, formed in July 2008 after the ATAN acquisition and publicly introduced at the ARC Advisory Group conference in Orlando, FL, last month. At the event, Accenture's AIS group announced an alliance with CSense Systems, which allows Accenture to use the company's Process Performance Enhancement suite, an analytics tool that provides a view into what is happening on the production floor.