ARC Reveals Process Industries Buying Collaborative Production Management Software

The market for Collaborative Production Management solutions for process manufacturing (CPM-P) is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 14 percent over the next five years, according to a recent study by ARC Advisory Group Inc. The market was slightly greater than $1.9 billion in 2007 and is forecasted to exceed $3.6 billion in 2012, the study said.

“The market grew by an unprecedented amount last year. Many factors contributed to the stellar growth, including continued economic success, the shifting of funds for corporate business systems to plant systems, greater integration and interoperability of systems, and the need for companies to improve real-time plant performance visibility,” said ARC Senior Analyst Tom Fiske, Ph.D., the principal author of the study, “Collaborative Production Management Systems for the Process Industries Worldwide Outlook.”

According to ARC, organisations are lowering the total cost of ownership by decreasing deployment efforts and reducing the number of applications that need to be supported and maintained. The necessity to find ways to make systems more similar and more standardized within the framework of their IT infrastructure is contributing to the high growth of CPM applications.

Manufacturers are also turning to CPM to help meet compliance needs, ARC said. Companies in a variety of industries face a wide array of challenges, not the least of which is complying with the continually evolving and increasingly more stringent state, federal, and international environmental standards and regulations. In order to satisfy increasingly stricter regulations, companies are turning to their collaborative production management systems as a way to facilitate compliance while meeting business needs, ARC said.