Sun plans new manufacturing sites

Electronic News, June 26, 1995

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.--In what could be viewed as an extension of its recent commitment at SunWorld to broaden its market focus away from the technical workstation market and target commercial markets with its SPARC hardware (EN, May 29), Sun at the annual Sun "Insights" conference said it will open four Manufacturing Centers of Excellence (MCOE) in 1995, two in Europe and two in the U.S.

Rather than staff the sites solely with Sun personnel, the company plans to include staff from its key commercial systems integrator (CSI) partners, who will be available to help manufacturers during systems planning and implementation phases. Sun has also teamed with database technology providers and universities, such as Warwick University, to build the centers. In addition, Sun said it plans to open several more MCOE facilities in the future.

The first four MCOEs are now under construction in Holland and the U.K in Europe, and in Philadelphia and San Diego in the U.S. Sun said it will install about $700,000 worth of servers, workstations and software at the four sites, which are expected to open before the end of the year.

"The concept of a multi-solution demo center is not new," admitted Mark Tolliver, vice president of strategy and business development at Sun. "What's new with our MCOE program is that everything is based on off-the-shelf, open systems technology. We're not interested in demonstrating how competent a single software solution might be. Instead, we're taking the opposite approach: manufacturers will visit an MCOE, describe their business problems, then get a first-hand look at an assembled, cohesive suite of packages," Mr. Tolliver added.

At SunWorld last month, Sun president and CEO Scott McNealy disclosed plans to remold the company from a technical workstation vendor into one targeting networking, medical and industrial markets. At SunWorld, the company referred to its new 64-bit Ultra-SPARC microprocessor at "The Net.Engine" in reference to the large number of networking applications and products at the show, especially for communication over the Internet.

Regarding the new MCOE sites, Sun said they will be situated at Utrecht, Holland; Coventry, England; Philadelphia, Pa.; and San Diego, Calif.

Located at Warwick University near Coventry, England, the Sun European Manufacturing Centre of Excellence (SEMCOE) will enable discrete component manufacturers to view manufacturing equipment linked with the SEMCOE enterprise application suite, which includes CAD, ERP (enterprise resources planning), PDM (Product-data management) and MES (manufacturing execution systems) solutions. The integration partner for SEMCOE is Computer Sciences Corp., which is also partnering with Sun on the San Diego facility. The Coventry facilities will be housed in the new Warwick International Manufacturing Centre.

Oracle Global Business Center, located in Philadelphia, is expected to offer a view of Oracle Corp.'s Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management suite of software solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, which was demonstrated in March at the Interphex trade show in New York.

Computer Sciences Corp.'s Best Practices lab in San Diego will be designed to enable aerospace and electronics manufacturers to see a variety of solution suites created to address the specific set of business problems in those sectors. A total of more than 25 categories will be demonstrated including CAD, ERP, MES, PDM and middleware among others. The fourth center, located in Utrecht, Holland at CAP/Volmac (the Dutch subsidiary of CAP/Gemini Sogeti), will focus on the enterprise-wide needs of process manufacturers in Europe.