Tata Consultancy Services (BSE: TCS.BO, NSE: TCS.NS), a global IT services, business solutions and outsourcing company, today announced it has teamed with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the world's leading provider of business software, on the launch of the TCS Center of Excellence Perfect Plant. After running successfully a Perfect Plant Center of Excellence in Newtown Square, USA, TCS and SAP now are bringing this creative concept for Perfect Plant to SAP's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany to cover the regions Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
The Center of Excellence Perfect Plant is operated by a global "virtual team" from TCS and SAP and will showcase SAP® manufacturing applications and partner composite applications working together in a simulated plant environment. Customers can leverage TCS' experience and expertise in cutting-edge solutions along with SAP manufacturing solutions to help them improve their plant efficiencies while lowering the total cost of ownership of their manufacturing infrastructure. TCS, with its Global Network Delivery ModelTM, delivers 'one-stop' domain expertise integrating shop-floor information into enterprise systems, enabling companies to consistently meet their business objectives.
The new Center of Excellence Perfect Plant will put into action elements of SAP's Perfect Plant initiative, a broader program designed to help manufacturers combine global manufacturing coordination with local execution to improve end-to-end manufacturing operations and financial performance. The initiative focuses on helping manufacturers reduce manufacturing costs, optimize asset utilization, deliver to customer requirements, and surpass quality and compliance objectives. It provides manufacturers with enhanced operations intelligence, a 360-degree view into all plant operations, and provides tight integration between planning, execution and business processes for cost-effective, efficient and coordinated "sense and response" to customer demands.
"The Perfect Plant initiative is a model of how companies can derive maximum efficiencies by integrating shop floor solutions with their ERP system," said Eric Krapf, Head of Engineering and Industrial Services in Europe, TCS. "The Center of Excellence Perfect Plant combines the strengths of SAP solutions in manufacturing and TCS' engineering expertise in shop-floor systems and solutions to bring Adaptive Manufacturing closer to reality for global manufacturers." Patrick Brett, Director SAP Adaptive Manufacturing EMEA at TCS added: "The Center of Excellence Perfect Plant in Walldorf affords exposure to world-class prototyping facilities for SAP and TCS' manufacturing customers across EMEA. This is just the latest stage in a very significant global investment by TCS and there is much more to come."
In 2007 TCS won an SAP Pinnacle Award for Industry Solutions in the Go-to-Market category. The Center of Excellence Perfect Plant is the outcome of the initiatives by TCS and SAP to drive co-innovation and to provide enhanced value to customers around the world.
As analyst firm AMR Research stated in a recent study "for the time being, users looking to deploy SAP MII are best served by looking to partners like TCS and others to bring commercial product discipline to their deployments".
With the help of the Center of Excellence Perfect Plant, enterprises interested in addressing their operational challenges are able to design, develop and test solutions in a rapid prototyping mode and simulate the optimization in a risk-free environment. The benefits of implementing solutions designed at the Center of Excellence include reduced manufacturing and maintenance costs, increased plant efficiencies and production yields, reduced asset capital investments and inventory, reduced premium freight costs, and increased value-chain agility and customer responsiveness.
According to Simon Pollard, SAP Vice President Perfect Plant, EMEA "The partnership between SAP and TCS is truly global, which, as well as being important to our joint clients as larger international manufacturing companies, has significant efficiency and cost advantages in the re-use and deployment of technology enabled manufacturing best practices. The opening of the Center of Excellence Perfect Plant in Germany represents another strong step forward in our joint abilities to share the benefits available to companies in following a Perfect Plant Roadmap." |