SAP’s Hasso Plattner steps back up as Léo Apotheker departs

It's been a stormy few days for the SAP executive board – with other changes including chief technology officer Vishal Sikka moving up, while Hasso Plattner (co-founder and chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board) steps back up to the plate in an advisory role for the new leaders. Still, SAP's PR machine says it's all for the best: "The new setup of the SAP executive board will allow SAP to better align product innovation with customer needs," says Plattner. Sounds very little different to the story before Apotheker's departure, and the new MES templates were clearly well underway beforehand. Nevertheless, they do appear impressive, insofar as users will get "preconfigured, best practice templates for SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) to support light weight manufacturing execution in batch manufacturing industries". What's more, these are "cost-free" and, according to SAP, extend its MII architecture by providing plant- and role-specific composite MES applications to support manufacturing preparation, execution, documentation and reporting. In brief detail, SAP's new templates cover nine application areas: role-specific manufacturing operations 'cockpits', manufacturing order list, material identification, work instructions, quality control, production confirmation, shift book, monitoring and logging, and manufacturing performance. Switzerland-based Sika, a manufacturer of specialty chemicals, was the driver for this batch manufacturing project, and reports success both functionally and from a cost perspective. The company defined and implemented SAP MII composites, developed by SAP partner Trebing + Himstedt, with a new plant opened to increase production of its Sikaflex products.