News
SAP Acquires Lighthammer
29.06.2005
SAP AG announced that it is acquiring Lighthammer Software Development Corporation, a privately-held supplier of enterprise manufacturing intelligence and collaborative manufacturing software based in Exton, Pennsylvania
The acquisition will allow SAP to deliver enhanced connectivity between the plant floor and the enterprise, and the acquisition will deliver value through improved manufacturing performance with rapid time-to-value for SAP's installed base of more than 12,000 manufacturing customers. Lighthammer's Collaborative Manufacturing Suite (CMS) will be delivered as an SAP xApps composite application on the SAP NetWeaver platform.
The announcement was made at the ARC Advisory Group's Performance Driven Manufacturing Forum in Boston, Massachusetts.
The acquisition supports SAP's commitment to offering an ISA-95 enabled manufacturing solution that further reduces the complexity of building custom connections to shop floor systems and thereby accelerates the time-to-value for the end customer. The SAP Lighthammer solution will provide real-time visibility to manufacturing exceptions and performance variances, including root causes and business impacts, enabling manufacturers and their production personnel to adapt to change and rapidly respond to unforeseen demand and supply events. The combination will enable SAP to deliver real-time transactional integration between ERP and plant floor systems as well as unified, real-time analytics and visualization, often referred to as "manufacturing intelligence," out-of-the box to its manufacturing customers, and the combination will also enable companies to leverage their current investments at a lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO).
Utilizing the ISA-95 standards for manufacturing interoperability, the Lighthammer and SAP manufacturing solution will exchange data and render them through the SAP manufacturing intelligence dashboards to deliver actionable intelligence in the form of alerts, reports, key performance indicators (KPIs) and decision support to production personnel for right time decision making. The combined solution will allow production personnel to identify deviations in real time, provide drill-downs to understand the business and financial impact of the exceptions to be managed and display the workflows to resolve them rapidly and cost-effectively, resulting in improved productivity.
SAP stated that the acquisition is expected to be completed in July 2005, and the Lighthammer employees will remain in their current facilities in Exton, Pennsylvania, and will become a part of SAP America and SAP Labs.
Andy Chatha, ARC Advisory Group, commented, “The Lighthammer acquisition by SAP is great news for manufacturing companies, and it further highlights SAP's commitment to help their clients achieve standards-based Interoperability between production and business systems.”
