TCS, SAP sign pact for manufacturing solutions

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has signed a global partnership with SAP AG to deliver adaptive manufacturing solutions to enterprise customers across worldwide.

The partners will use SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) and TCS' manufacturing industry-specific applications to integrate shopfloor activities with enterprise applications.

TCS also announced that its software tool for plant information integration, which will form the basis for these composites, was certified as 'Powered by SAP NetWeaver', a company release said today.

"This partnership brings together a comprehensive solution from SAP, with a compelling global delivery model and manufacturing solutions domain expertise from TCS. We look forward to help our customers embrace adaptive manufacturing strategy and enhance manufacturing competitiveness, while lowering the total cost of ownership on their manufacturing infrastructure," said Sudipta Bhattacharya, SAP AG senior vice-president for manufacturing and PLM solutions.

The SAP xMII solution, launched by SAP in October 2005, helps manufacturers become more adaptive by connecting mySAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) to the plant floor in real time and delivering actionable intelligence.

The solution is normally implemented in a plant within four to ten weeks.

Besides providing the implementation and support services, TCS will also set up a dedicated team to develop 'composites' "� the pre-configured industry or application-specific templated software solutions that are based on the SAP NetWeaver platform. This will be done jointly with SAP's development team in India and Germany.