Over a year ago, Emerson quietly acquired Decision Management International (DMI), a maker of manufacturing execution systems. Unlike Invensys or SAP, which made a big splash into the MES marketplace with their acquisitions of CIMNET and Visiprise, respectively, Emerson chose to bring a small, unknown, and very vertically oriented company under its wing.
At first glance, this is Emerson’s attempt to gain a foothold in the budding manufacturing operations management market. According to an AMR Research report, MES specifically (excluding asset management and EMI) is expected to post 14% compound annual growth through 2011, increasing from $2.7 billion in 2006 to $5.2 billion in 2011.
But Emerson hasn’t been completely absent from the MES field. It has been dabbling in MES since 2003, when it struck up a strategic alliance with DMI, then a 35-person, Florida-based business catering to the pharmaceutical industry. The companies had complementary products built on Microsoft .NET using object-oriented code. The two worked together with several major pharmaceutical customers that needed the Emerson DeltaV advanced control and batch system together with an operational management program. And though Emerson’s management team wanted to delay any MES acquisition until they were sure they could make money, they ultimately had to surrender to customer pressure.
“We had several major customers going through a combination of laying out an operational improvement program [together with] the technology to make it work. Those are the companies that bought into the idea and encouraged us to acquire [DMI],” said Bob Lenich, director of data management service and solutions at Emerson Process Management.