Part II of this blog series expanded on some of TEC’s earlier articles about companies’ need for better links between the plant floor and the enterprise offices. It also pointed out the difficulties in achieving this noble idea, and gave examples of some vendors with success in providing integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) solutions.

Another chronic problem is how to foster plant workers’ acceptance of integrated ERP, MES, and plant (operations) intelligence technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

This week BMC announced it had secured the purchase of ITM Software, a business management provider. BMC is a publically traded data center automation company that competes directly with CA Inc, HP, and IBM. It’s clients include DELL, Home Depot, and Toyota. Over the past two years, BMC has been busy snapping up different IT companies, such as Proactive Net (June 2007), RealOps (July 2007), and Emprisa Networks (October 2007). It’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Bengal Acquisition Corporation acquired 96.7% interest in BladeLogic. Read the rest of this entry »