Beijing, China- March 4th, 2009- e-works, IT application portal of Chinese manufacturing, announced ‘ten features of Chinese manufacturing management software and service market in 2008’, on the 3rd Chinese manufacturing CIO forum. 

 

1. ERP help companies move toward lean management, so that it become an essential IT application
ERP is becoming more and more important and helping many enterprises realize lean management, reduce the time to market, and improve the quality of product, so that Chinese manufacturing enterprises has widely accepted ERP as a must-use application software to support the realization of their strategy. 

 

2. CIO pay more attention on business processes instead of IT
When IT infrastructure and application systems are in the right way, CIO's role has been redefined from IT focus to business focus. CIO needs to find a good way to support continuously changing business processes by IT systems.

 

3. SAAS is still at the early stage of application
Though many software vendors promote SAAS model, but most Chinese manufacturing enterprises are still worrying about how to protect their business secret security and meet their unique needs.

 

4. Fast growing enterprise is the engine of Chinese ERP market
While the ERP application of large-scale manufacturing enterprises has been relatively mature, there are thousands of fast growing manufacturing enterprises around China, such as in heavy industrial machine, automotive, food and beverage, pharmaceutical industries. These enterprises are anxious to use ERP to support their fast expanding and acquisition. However, the challenge for these enterprises and ERP vendors is their need and process are always changing, so the scalability and architecture of ERP software is essential for these enterprises.   

 

5. Manufacturing BI market become hot
Senior managers of Chinese manufacturing enterprises urgently need new business analysis tools to help them make better decisions. It makes BI needs fast growing, especially in automotive, hi-tech and electronic industries.

6. SOA is the trend of application but still needs time to be adopted
New SOA based ERP, such as Ufida U9 has been released, some international ERP vendors, for example SAP, Infor, IFS, has announced their SOA strategy and platform, and mainstream IT infrastructure providers, including IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Tibco, have announced their SOA solutions. SOA has been widely accepted as an important trend of application software, but it still needs sometimes and more references to show the real value and benefit of SOA.
 
7. CRM application changes from in-house development to purchasing software suite
Because of the uniqueness of sales and service management process, many manufacturing enterprises chose to develop CRM system by themselves years ago. But as the progress of software architecture, CRM suite could be configured to meet the unique needs, so more and more enterprises changed to apply software suite, such as Microsoft and Sage CRM to cut the cost and time to apply CRM software.

 

8. MES application of discrete manufacturing seek breakthrough
At present, the MES application of process manufacturing is much batter than discrete manufacturing in China. Many enterprises have integrated MES with ERP and automation systems. MES help these enterprises improve the traceability and quality of products. However, the MES application in discrete manufacturing still has long way to go.

 

9. Supply chain management has been core applications 
Many Chinese manufacturing enterprises have applied ERP to manage internal supply chain. Now, more and more such enterprises began to deploy supply chain management system to collaborate with suppliers and resellers. Some large manufacturing companies has launched integration portal to share information with logistical and retail companies.

 

10. ERP vendors got new chances from newly released Chinese ‘Sarbanes-Oxley’ Act.
The release of Chinese act to improve the audit and internal control of enterprises bring new opportunities to mainstream ERP vendors to help their customers to obey the act.

 

About e-works:
e-works portal (www.e-works.net.cn) is the most popular IT application portal, online media, and service platform in Chinese manufacturing IT application area. Started up at 2002, e-works company focus on providing knowledge, information and consulting service for Chinese manufacturing enterprises and IT vendors. There is a huge knowledge base of manufacturing IT application technologies, such as PLM, ERP, IT infrastructure, advanced manufacturing technology on e-works portal. e-works has become the best community for CIO and IT managers to learn the relevant knowledge and share their experience of IT application. By the end of 2008, e-works has over 400,000 members around China and abroad.