In a recently published study on the Collaborative Production Management for Process Manufacturing (CPM-P or MES) market by industry analyst firm ARC, ABB maintained its leading market position as a global supplier of CPM-P software and services. The study also discusses how this market segment is growing worldwide across a wide range of process industries. The total worldwide market for CPM Systems in the process industries was more than $1,126 million in 2003, representing growth of 9.5 percent from 2002.
According to ARC, CPM-P refers to the application of collaborative manufacturing principles to the management of manufacturing processes. Production management normally refers to the planning, execution, tracking, reporting, and optimizing of manufacturing processes CPM solutions represent a suite of applications that combine visibility into real-time production status, traceability and genealogy of manufactured product, performance analysis of production operations to identify trends and weaknesses, paperless management of the production process to reduce overhead, and operator instructions in the form of schedules, recipes, operating instructions, and batch records. Software solutions that provide limited subsets of these functions were excluded from this study (e.g., Data Management or SPC/SQC packages).
ARC recognizes three main categories of Collaborative Production Management solutions:
• Plan & Schedule;
• Direct & Operate;
• Track, Analyze & Inform.
For more information, visit www.arcweb.com or www.abb.com.