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The looming impact of integration, WiFi, RFID

Technological advances have already driven dramatic improvements in manufacturing.

But according to Sudipta Bhattacharya, a senior vice president at SAP Labs LLC, based in Irving, Texas, the best is still to come. What’s more, it’s just over the next horizon.

“There are three major things that are happening simultaneously right now that will transform the way that manufacturing is done,” Bhattacharya declares. “We have no doubt that the best years of manufacturing productivity are now ahead of us.”

Bhattacharya’s comments came during an interview with Wes Iversen, managing editor of Packaging World sister publication Automation World at the Sapphire customer conference hosted by enterprise software giant SAP AG, May 16-18, in Orlando, Fla. Not surprisingly, Bhattacharya sees SAP systems and capabilities playing an important role in the coming manufacturing productivity revolution. But there will be plenty of contributions from other vendors as well.

What are the three “major things” on Bhattacharya’s list? All are technologies that are here today, but that are still in various stages of emergence. Their arrival may be staggered somewhat, but all three will achieve mass market acceptance within the next three to five years, Bhattacharya predicts. And their convergence will trigger an onslaught of productivity advances.

The first on the list is shop floor-to-top floor integration. Bhattacharya sees SAP’s xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (xMII) application as a poster child for enabling this capability. The ability to seamlessly link to any number of shop floor applications for real-time data exchange between factory and enterprise systems will enable new visibility that will greatly improve decision-making, he says, driving big improvements in manufacturing performance and efficiency.

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