Many (most)corporate IT folks are talking about the cloud and business process management (BPM) as the next savior for manufacturing companies. But most enterprise vendors, system integrators (SIs) and IT end users have not recognized the critical requirement that BPM must have a semantic manufacturing information model to aggregate plant-side master data and instance data from Level 2 (SCADA to Level 3 (MOM) to Level 4 (ERP and SC) and back.
There is an especial difference in operations process management (OPM) for real-time work process sequencing and transaction orchestration as well. IBM has actually come out and stated that its BPM implementations have failed without the semantic information model, so now, IBM's public methodology requires it.
I have spent literally hundreds of hours with ERP and supply chain folks in (very) critical reviews while working the operations side of the house. They dismiss the OpenO&M approach through their SAP brainwashing. They do not understand what real-time work process architecture is and requires, especially for lifecycle cost and plant adaptability to market. So where enterprise vendors, SIs, and corporate IT may know a lot about 20th-century manufacturing, they have big holes, as we all do, on the 21st-century MOM form. A word of caution.
