I am just returning from the SAP Manufacturing Forum in Pittsburgh that was held at Westinghouse’s beautiful new headquarters in Cranberry Township. Besides getting to visit my hometown, and the occasional snow flurries, it was a great event for manufacturing companies in the Pittsburgh area (and some a bit farther away) to talk about issues in adopting and using information technology to solve business challenges in their companies.
There were presentations from Westinghouse and Kennametal on their SAP ERP implementations (which are doing quite nicely, thank you), interesting talks from Axiall – the new spinoff of PPG’s commodity chemicals business, and PPG itself on their spend management projects with Ariba, and SAP company. We also heard from Joy Global on their use of Smartops to reduce inventory while maintaining or improving customer service levels (try that without an optimization tool). And, Hershey’s (I know, they aren’t from Pittsburgh but they are in Pennsylvania and you can’t leave out chocolate!) talked about a very interesting cloud-based HR solution that they implemented with SAP’s SuccessFactors software. There were also SAP presentations on new innovations including Business Suite on HANA and Industrial Mobility applications.
There were a lot of discussions and networking and it continued into the evening at a restaurant just down the road from Westinghouse. All in all, a great event to share experiences, meet new people and realize that many companies are dealing with similar business issues. If you were there or wanted to be but couldn't, let me know what topics you would like us to cover in future sessions -and, see you at the next one!
