CPM to grow substantially

The collaborative production-management market for process manufacturing (CPM-P) is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of some 12% over the next five years. The market was over $1.3 billion in 2005 and is forecast to approach $2.3 billion in 2010, according to a new study by the ARC Advisory Group .

The CPM-P solutions market has been steady for the past couple of years, but this is rapidly changing as demand is on the rise. “Contributing to growth is increased demand from developing regions that are constructing new plants and purchasing best-in-class solutions to achieve world-class manufacturing capabilities and have their products well accepted around the world,” said Tom Fiske, senior analyst and principal author of: “CPM Systems for the Process Industries Worldwide Outlook.” Fiske continued, “As global competition increases, existing manufacturing facilities are under incredible pressure to improve their return on assets (ROA). To achieve higher levels of performance, these plants are adopting more CPM solutions that better link manufacturing operations with business objectives, that increases their flexibility and agility, and that synchronizes their supply chain operations.

To help improve performance, organizations are tightly linking manufacturing operations with business objectives. As such, the users’ need for operations performance intelligence (OPI) that provides real-time visualization and performance analysis of process information is fueling market growth, the report suggests. OPI makes production information available to everyone and associates actionable items to the contextualized information to improve performance. CPM applications are responsible for acquiring and transforming data into information about plant performance related to quality, delivery, cost, and a host of other business-related metrics, the report says.

Efforts to synchronize the supply chain are also spurring growth. While costs remain an important issue of performance in customer-centric, demand-driven environments, other factors, such as time-to-volume, determining the correct product mix, and having the flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to exploit market opportunities, are increasingly becoming important to success. Supply chain synchronization depends on CPM solutions that provide accurate real-time information from operations to enable improved decision-making at all company levels and for supply-chain trading partners, ARC noted.

— Richard Phelps, senior editor, Control Engineering
richard.phelps@reedbusiness.com

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