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SAP Loses Key Manufacturing Leader

by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Thursday, August 16, 2007 5:45:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

Sudipta Bhattacharya, a senior vice president at SAP and a principal architect of the company's manufacturing product strategy over the past three years, will leave the software company at the end of August to join automation products giant Invensys in a yet-to-be defined role.

Bhattacharya, who heads SAP's global supply chain management, manufacturing, and product lifecycle management applications strategy, said in an interview with Managing Automation today that he decided to leave SAP to pursue new challenges.

"After five and a half years at SAP, I wanted to do something different, yet remain part of the ecosystem that I helped build and had grown to admire," said Bhattacharya, referring to partnerships with Invensys and other companies he helped forge. "I have done my role here. It's time for others with different ideas to step in."

Officials at Invensys declined to comment on Bhattacharya's role at the company.

SAP has not yet announced a replacement.

Bhattacharya was a principal author of SAP's Adaptive Manufacturing initiative, launched three years ago. The initiative, AMR Research research director Colin Masson told Managing Automation, helped elevate SAP's role in the manufacturing market. AMR Research is expected to publish a report on Bhattacharya's departure on Friday.

"SAP woke up and realized the manufacturing market had been underserved and that [SAP] needed to play a role in bringing new capability," Masson said.

Through the Adaptive Manufacturing initiative, manufacturing has become a more integral piece of SAP's supply chain and ERP product strategies. As part of the initiative, the company has enhanced its ERP and supply chain products with manufacturing-specific functionality, such as manufacturing dashboards, manufacturing intelligence tools, and support for lean, Six Sigma, and RFID manufacturing methods and technologies. A key part of the initiative has also involved SAP's strong support for enterprise-to-plant-floor integration through the ISA-S95 set of standards.

Under Bhattacharya, SAP's embrace of those standards, coupled with the availability of its NetWeaver SOA-based integration tools, has made it easier for manufacturing-oriented independent software vendors to build composite applications that link with SAP's enterprise applications. SAP and Bhattacharya used that technology framework over the past three years to build a strong set of manufacturing software partners, including Apriso, Invensys, NRX, and Lighthammer.

SAP's push to partner with such MES providers, AMR's Masson said, represented a dramatic — and, ultimately, successful — change for the company.

"Up until that point, the strategy was to block everybody else from selling software because it all had to be SAP," Masson said. "But SAP hadn't built any significant capabilities for the shop floor. Sudipta saw that, at the end of the day, the MES model doesn't fit with the ERP model and that it would be best for SAP to play the role of enterprise orchestrator."

Bhattacharya's role in pushing SAP toward a partnering strategy also helped lead the company to a string of manufacturing-focused acquisitions that included Lighthammer (now dubbed xMII) in 2005 and, late last year, lean scheduling and supply synchronization software vendor Factory Logic.

SAP officials said Bhattacharya's departure does not signal, nor will it cause, a change in SAP's manufacturing strategy.

"We hate to see him go, but this does not signal a change in the strategy," spokesman William Wohl said. "Through whatever disruptions, we will continue on course." He said it is too early to say if or with whom SAP will replace Bhattacharya. Wohl noted, however, that Bhattacharya has managed to build a strong manufacturing team within SAP.

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