SSA Global announced it has acquired Marcam, a provider of specialized, operational-level enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for process manufacturers, from Invensys plc, the global automation and controls group with headquarters in the UK, and from which SSA Global also bought Baan about a year ago.
Before we delve deeper into the merger's strengths and weaknesses, let us revisit what SSA Global hereby obtains. The acquired company, although constantly morphing from Marcam to IPS back to Marcam, has a good track record and a heritage of selling solutions to manage divisional or autonomous plant sites within selected process industries. (For details, see parts Two and Three of this note.)
The products are very strong in plant level management functionality, given the progenitor, former Marcam Solutions, headquartered in Newton, MA, was one of the first global providers of ERP and enterprise asset management (EAM) software exclusively for process manufacturing enterprises and large corporate divisions. Marcam Solutions was created after the 1997 breakup of Marcam Corporation, a company that had struggled to manage the business of two product lines that targeted the two completely different markets of discrete and process manufacturing. Namely, the dissolution of Marcam Corporation had then created two new ERP software companies, Marcam Solutions and MAPICS Inc. (NASDAQ: MAPX), the latter of which is still going strong in its original form and within the discrete manufacturing market.
Paul Margolis and John Campbell founded Marcam (a name derived from their last names) back in 1980 to provide then IBM-owned MAPICS ERP product installation and customization services. In 1983 Marcam began developing its own planning and control software for process manufacturing companies such as food, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. The result was PRISM, which was first licensed in 1987. Marcam went public in 1990 and acquired ShawWare (maintenance management applications, whose Avantis product is now a part of a different unit within Invensys) in 1991, and the MAPICS product line from IBM in 1993. Marcam launched Protean ERP software in 1994, and during 1995, it all but halted major development of a client/server version of PRISM to focus on its similar but technologically more advanced and seemingly more prospective Protean line.
The PRISM and Protean software suites both automate tasks such as resource planning, production model development, and quality control management. Marcam sold its product primarily through its direct sales force in close to twenty offices worldwide. The Company also partnered with a number of industry-leading vendors including Hewlett-Packard, NEC (as a reseller and a developer of earlier versions of Protean in the Japanese market), IBM, and PeopleSoft, to name some. Marcam Solutions had approached its financial management functional gap by partnering and offering warranted integration to major financial applications such as SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, and CODA. By 1999, the Company had approximately 1,400 customer sites in over forty countries before it was acquired by Invensys' Wonderware division.
As mentioned earlier, the PRISM product is a veteran of the process ERP market with many considering it the pioneer in this segment, and it can arguably be called the most widely installed plant-level process ERP product available. The company claims that all of its 1,200 sites (i.e., with its own server unit) are running plants, with many installations running multiple plants, given these sites originate from little over 450 corporate customers. IPS' management estimated in 2003 that PRISM then had over 85,000 users worldwide, out of total 100,000 users for both products together.
This is Part Four of a six-part note.
Part One provided background information.
Parts Two and Three discussed the marketing by Invensys.
Part Five will cover the merger impact and challenges.
Part Six will discuss competition and make vendor and user recommendations.
PRISM
PRISM boasts deep manufacturing, financial, and distribution functionality for process-oriented manufacturers and the quality advantage of decades of use by customers. However, its sales order management module has worked well mainly for environments with medium complexity of order management. PRISM's main liability though has been its reliance on the dependable but lately less trendy IBM AS/400 (now IBM iSeries) platform. The product was written almost completely in IBM RPG (Report Program Generator) aged language, with only a very limited number of C++ functions on the client side. Unlike Protean, which was envisioned as a product of the future and thus had the vast majority of development resources from its inception, PRISM had long received only limited enhancements that focused mainly on customer-requested functional, but not technological, changes in the product.
The most significant recent enhancement to PRISM was possibly for Y2K compliance in release 4.3, which shipped way back in 1996. Thus, it continues to have quite limited success in IBM AS/400-centric process manufacturers and generates the bulk of its revenue from a large installed base. The large installed base in turn means that niche independent software vendors (ISV) with add-on enhancement systems that address the needs of the process market have had increased opportunities over the last several years, and possibly going forward (see Stratyc's Laser-Sharp Focused Tools Retrofit Legacy Systems and MAPICS XA Expands BI Offering Through Partnership With Vanguard). Thus, much of SSA Global's recent expertise in supporting also aged and the IBM AS/400-based PRMS and BPCS products might be useful to unrelenting PRISM's customers, while, on the other hand, these SSA Global products can "borrow" some still unrivaled process ERP capabilities of PRISM. Given the products' platform, architecture, and functional similarity, one should envision a viable migration path for PRISM users to SSA LX, which will feature an IBM WebSphere-based thin-client user interface (UI) and many extension modules, such as supplier relationship management (SRM) or e-commerce engine originating from former Ironside.
Protean
Protean, on its hand, claims much of the same functionality as PRISM with some functional enhancements on UNIX or Microsoft Windows platforms. Its major modules would be: production modeling, formula management, planning and scheduling, inventory management, product costing, asset management, customer order management, procurement, and financials. It has a deep functionality for batch-based hybrid (i.e., both process and some discrete repetitive) manufacturing such as for food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) enterprises, as well as capabilities for complex process manufacturers requiring some continuous process capabilities, recycling and recurring materials (e.g., catalysts), and product characteristics-based planning capability, as in the case of some chemical companies
SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-name-and-ownership-change-roulette-wheel-for-marcam-stops-at-ssa-global-part-four-what-ssa-global-gets-17561/
Before we delve deeper into the merger's strengths and weaknesses, let us revisit what SSA Global hereby obtains. The acquired company, although constantly morphing from Marcam to IPS back to Marcam, has a good track record and a heritage of selling solutions to manage divisional or autonomous plant sites within selected process industries. (For details, see parts Two and Three of this note.)
The products are very strong in plant level management functionality, given the progenitor, former Marcam Solutions, headquartered in Newton, MA, was one of the first global providers of ERP and enterprise asset management (EAM) software exclusively for process manufacturing enterprises and large corporate divisions. Marcam Solutions was created after the 1997 breakup of Marcam Corporation, a company that had struggled to manage the business of two product lines that targeted the two completely different markets of discrete and process manufacturing. Namely, the dissolution of Marcam Corporation had then created two new ERP software companies, Marcam Solutions and MAPICS Inc. (NASDAQ: MAPX), the latter of which is still going strong in its original form and within the discrete manufacturing market.
Paul Margolis and John Campbell founded Marcam (a name derived from their last names) back in 1980 to provide then IBM-owned MAPICS ERP product installation and customization services. In 1983 Marcam began developing its own planning and control software for process manufacturing companies such as food, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. The result was PRISM, which was first licensed in 1987. Marcam went public in 1990 and acquired ShawWare (maintenance management applications, whose Avantis product is now a part of a different unit within Invensys) in 1991, and the MAPICS product line from IBM in 1993. Marcam launched Protean ERP software in 1994, and during 1995, it all but halted major development of a client/server version of PRISM to focus on its similar but technologically more advanced and seemingly more prospective Protean line.
The PRISM and Protean software suites both automate tasks such as resource planning, production model development, and quality control management. Marcam sold its product primarily through its direct sales force in close to twenty offices worldwide. The Company also partnered with a number of industry-leading vendors including Hewlett-Packard, NEC (as a reseller and a developer of earlier versions of Protean in the Japanese market), IBM, and PeopleSoft, to name some. Marcam Solutions had approached its financial management functional gap by partnering and offering warranted integration to major financial applications such as SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, and CODA. By 1999, the Company had approximately 1,400 customer sites in over forty countries before it was acquired by Invensys' Wonderware division.
As mentioned earlier, the PRISM product is a veteran of the process ERP market with many considering it the pioneer in this segment, and it can arguably be called the most widely installed plant-level process ERP product available. The company claims that all of its 1,200 sites (i.e., with its own server unit) are running plants, with many installations running multiple plants, given these sites originate from little over 450 corporate customers. IPS' management estimated in 2003 that PRISM then had over 85,000 users worldwide, out of total 100,000 users for both products together.
This is Part Four of a six-part note.
Part One provided background information.
Parts Two and Three discussed the marketing by Invensys.
Part Five will cover the merger impact and challenges.
Part Six will discuss competition and make vendor and user recommendations.
PRISM
PRISM boasts deep manufacturing, financial, and distribution functionality for process-oriented manufacturers and the quality advantage of decades of use by customers. However, its sales order management module has worked well mainly for environments with medium complexity of order management. PRISM's main liability though has been its reliance on the dependable but lately less trendy IBM AS/400 (now IBM iSeries) platform. The product was written almost completely in IBM RPG (Report Program Generator) aged language, with only a very limited number of C++ functions on the client side. Unlike Protean, which was envisioned as a product of the future and thus had the vast majority of development resources from its inception, PRISM had long received only limited enhancements that focused mainly on customer-requested functional, but not technological, changes in the product.
The most significant recent enhancement to PRISM was possibly for Y2K compliance in release 4.3, which shipped way back in 1996. Thus, it continues to have quite limited success in IBM AS/400-centric process manufacturers and generates the bulk of its revenue from a large installed base. The large installed base in turn means that niche independent software vendors (ISV) with add-on enhancement systems that address the needs of the process market have had increased opportunities over the last several years, and possibly going forward (see Stratyc's Laser-Sharp Focused Tools Retrofit Legacy Systems and MAPICS XA Expands BI Offering Through Partnership With Vanguard). Thus, much of SSA Global's recent expertise in supporting also aged and the IBM AS/400-based PRMS and BPCS products might be useful to unrelenting PRISM's customers, while, on the other hand, these SSA Global products can "borrow" some still unrivaled process ERP capabilities of PRISM. Given the products' platform, architecture, and functional similarity, one should envision a viable migration path for PRISM users to SSA LX, which will feature an IBM WebSphere-based thin-client user interface (UI) and many extension modules, such as supplier relationship management (SRM) or e-commerce engine originating from former Ironside.
Protean
Protean, on its hand, claims much of the same functionality as PRISM with some functional enhancements on UNIX or Microsoft Windows platforms. Its major modules would be: production modeling, formula management, planning and scheduling, inventory management, product costing, asset management, customer order management, procurement, and financials. It has a deep functionality for batch-based hybrid (i.e., both process and some discrete repetitive) manufacturing such as for food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) enterprises, as well as capabilities for complex process manufacturers requiring some continuous process capabilities, recycling and recurring materials (e.g., catalysts), and product characteristics-based planning capability, as in the case of some chemical companies
SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-name-and-ownership-change-roulette-wheel-for-marcam-stops-at-ssa-global-part-four-what-ssa-global-gets-17561/
No comments:
Post a Comment