SAP Delivers Measurable Value to Manufacturing Customers

SAP Delivers Measurable Value to Manufacturing Customers

Validating the company’s strategy of strong organic growth combined with strategic, “tuck-in” acquisitions, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced more than 300 installations of the SAP® xApp™ Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) composite application are in place just one year following the company’s integration of the acquisition of Lighthammer Software Development Corporation in June 2005. Leading manufacturers including Arla Foods, Eastman Chemical Company, Pemex Gas y Petroquímica Básica and Whirlpool have all selected SAP xMII. Built on the SAP NetWeaver® platform, the SAP xMII composite application enables manufacturers and their production personnel to adapt to change and respond rapidly to shifts in demand by providing real-time visibility to manufacturing exceptions and performance variances, including root causes and business impacts. The announcement was made today at the SAP Adaptive Manufacturing Summit, being held in Denver, Colorado, September 27 – 28.

“SAP xMII is our chosen solution that enables us to drive transactional integration between our regional instances of mySAP ERP and our manufacturing facilities around the world,” said James R. Shimp, vice president, global applications development, Whirlpool Corporation. “Our SAP xMII solutions enable increases in quality performance and asset utilization. We’ve realized a significant return on investment since we started using SAP xMII by bringing better information solutions to the shop floor.”

SAP xMII is the application resulting from SAP’s 2005 acquisition of Lighthammer to add valuable software functionality that fulfills customer demands worldwide. It extends SAP’s manufacturing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software into plant operations, providing end-to-end visibility, analytics and control of manufacturing processes, increasing responsiveness and efficiency. In a globally competitive marketplace, manufacturers are faced with a need to efficiently adapt to shifts in customer demand, increase speed of product innovations and make necessary adjustments to production plans. SAP xMII enables the delivery of real-time transactional integration between ERP software from SAP and plant floor systems. It allows SAP to offer customers unified, real-time analytics and visualization—often referred to as “manufacturing intelligence”—as an out-of-the box solution for customers in manufacturing industries. The combination also enables companies to leverage their current manufacturing investments at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

“SAP xMII has enabled us to aggregate data from multiple, disparate systems across the enterprise and deploy applications rapidly to empower executives, managers, supply chain and production personnel with the decision support they need to deliver superior performance,” said Scott Dietrich, Business Performance Management Team Lead, Eastman Chemical Company. “The three-year net present value on the portfolio of composite applications we have developed using SAP xMII in 2006 is anticipated to be around $20 million.”

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