Intelligent Manufacturing € February € 1997 € Vol. 3 € No. 2

News in Brief

STADCO Signs Deal with ShivaSoft
Standard Tool & Die Co. (STADCO) (Los Angeles, Calif.), a manufacturer of precision aerospace tooling, has signed an agreement with ShivaSoft (Edmonton, Ab., Canada; http://www.shivasoft.com), a provider of manufacturing management and finite capacity scheduling software, to implement the Shiva scheduling and planning software in its plant.

AutoSimulations Acquires ISS
AutoSimulations (Bountiful, Utah; http://www.autosim.com), a vendor of simulation and scheduling software, has acquired the Integrated Scheduling System (ISS) Products division of U.K.-based Integral Solutions Ltd. AutoSimulations will combine ISS's integration, dispatching and reporting technology with its AutoSched simulation and scheduling product.

The new AutoSched product family will have three major components: the Simulator (ASAP), the Real-Time Dispatcher (RTD) and the ISS Reporter. These are linked via a common repository, which contains a temporal (time-based) representation of the state of the factory. The repository is updated in response to any event captured by the manufacturing execution system (MES).

DEC Names Intercim as ISV
Computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corp. (Marlborough, Mass.; http://www.dec.com) has named Intercim Corp. (Minneapolis, Minn.; http://www.intercim.com), a supplier of factory information management systems and services, as an integrated solutions vendor (ISV) of its Integrated Factory solution. Digital and Intercim will work together to provide manufacturing solutions to their customers.

Numetrix Teams Up with Ross
Numetrix (Toronto, Ont., Canada; http://www.numetrix.com), a supplier of supply chain management solutions, has formed a cooperative alliance with Ross Systems (Atlanta, Ga.; http://www.rossinc.com), a provider of client/server business solutions. The two companies will work jointly to optimize distribution planning and resource utilization across the entire supply chain. The goal of this effort is to empower the enterprise to acquire, transform and distribute goods to meet customer requirements in the most profitable manner.

PowerCerv Licenses ADAPTlications to Chatsworth
PowerCerv (Tampa, Fla.; http://www.powercerv.com), a provider of client/server applications engineered to accommodate change, has signed an enterprise-wide agreement to license its full suite of applications for manufacturing, distribution, sales force automation, customer support and financials to Chatsworth Products (Westlake Village, Calif.), a manufacturer of systems components and self-support racks. The applications will provide Chatsworth with complete customer lifecycle management capability in a Micro-soft BackOffice technology environment.

By utilizing PowerCerv's entire suite of ADAPT-lications (adaptable applications), Chatsworth will integrate the information captured throughout the lifecycle of the customer beginning with the sales process, flowing into the supply chain, into the customer support systems and back to the sales force. The hope is that integrating all the users throughout this life-cycle will improve customer relationships, increase productivity and increase the ability to sell more products to existing customers.

Land O'Lakes Turns to Oracle CPG
Butter manufacturer Land O'Lakes (Arden Hills, Minn.; http://www.landolakes.com) has selected the Oracle CPG (consumer packaged goods) suite from Oracle Corp. (Redwood Shores, Calif.; http://www.oracle.com) as part of its strategic initiative to improve business operations through technology. Oracle CPG will enable Land O'Lakes to more closely integrate with suppliers, partners and customers to manufacture and deliver products to meet market demand.

Oracle CPG will provide Land O'Lakes with the ability to act on market intelligence and immediately implement appropriate changes to its supply chain, manufacturing and financial processes. Oracle CPG is a modular, flexible software suite designed specifically for the consumer packaged goods industry. It is a suite of integrated business processes that cover scanner-based sales and marketing management, manufacturing and plant maintenance, order management and logistics, supply chain planning and management, data warehousing, and financial management.

Baan Awards Distributorship to KPMG
Baan (Menlo Park, Calif.; http://www.baan.com), a vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, has awarded the distributorship for the North American mid-size automotive marketplace to KPMG Peat Marwick LLP (New York, N.Y.; http://www.kpmg.com), a professional services and consulting firm. KPMG has also formed an Automotive Team for Baan to market and distribute integrated consulting services, implementation services, hardware and the Baan system to the automotive industry.

QAD Teams Up with Enterprise Engines
QAD (Carpinteria, Calif.; http://www.qad.com), a vendor of manufacturing and distribution management applications, is teaming up with Enterprise Engines (San Mateo, Calif.; http://www.engines.com) to develop a natural language, rules-based technology platform called the Enterprise Engine. This object-oriented development tool will allow developers to dynamically define and execute business object entities known as intelligent agents, which model and execute the operations of an organization.

Working closely with existing QAD customers, the Enterprise Engine will initially be deployed to solve supply chain and logistics problems for the bulk food and consumer packaged goods industries. The tool is based on the Convergent Engineering methodology developed by Enterprise Engines.

Fuji Licenses ROBCAD/Spot from Tecnomatix
Fuji Heavy Industries of Japan, manufacturer of the Subaru line of automobiles, has licensed ROBCAD/Spot software from Tecnomatix Technologies (Novi, Mich.; http://www.tecnomatix.com), a supplier of computer-aided production engineering (CAPE) software products. Subaru will use the ROBCAD/Spot software in its Production Engineering Division on every new car project, beginning with the new Legacy and Impreza automobiles.

Subaru engineers will use ROBCAD/Spot to design and program spot-welding production lines and to verify them before any investment is made on the shop floor.

British Aerospace Inks Pact with IBM
British Aerospace Military Aircraft, a U.K.-based airplane manufacturer, has chosen ProductManager, a product data management (PDM) system from computer giant IBM (Armonk, N.Y.; http://www.ibm.com), as an integral part of a major business process reengineering initiative. ProductManager will provide common access to all product information from conceptual design, through manufacturing definition, to the configuration of the delivered aircraft.

Initial users of ProductManager will be working on the Eurofighter 2000 aircraft, with a rapid roll-out to teams working on Nimrod 2000 and Hawk at five sites across the U.K.

Sun Chooses ICC's SFDM
Workstation manufacturer Sun Microsystems (Mountain View, Calif.; http://www.sun.com) has selected Shop Floor Data Manager (SFDM), a manufacturing execution system (MES) from Industrial Computer Corp. (ICC) (Atlanta), for implementation worldwide. SFDM will provide Sun management with integrated visibility to global production, with real-time shop floor data to support timely decisions and improved market responsiveness and flexibility. Sun chose SFDM in part because its Java operating system will be at the center of ICC's next-generation MES solution, currently in development.

SFDM provides a real-time view of all factory operations. Its key functional areas include detailed product routing and tracking, labor reporting, resource and rework management, production measurement, and mission-critical data collection. It provides up-to-the-minute production, customer and operator status.