SAP and HCL Axon's iMRO Offering

The SAP World Tour in Paris in the beginning of June gave me the opportunity to know more about the iMRO solution released at the end of 2008 with a new version expected soon. iMRO is a co-solution from SAP and HCL AXO to address industry specific functionality around Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO). It is a complimentary software product to SAP, which extends SAP ERP MRO specifically for this segment.

Maintenance and general maintenance of the operational conditions of major systems in the aerospace, defense and railway segments are complex industrial issues. For this reason, these activities have rarely adopted packaged software. However, operators in this segment must constantly reduce their costs while increasing asset utilization and reliability of their systems.

The release of iMRO is intended to meet more closely the needs of this segment. In this field, the solution players include Oracle, Lawson, IFS, IBM (Tivoli/MRO) and various best of breed's.

SAP has strongly invested to cover the requirements of the manufacturing industry: expanded its offerings in the field of SCM and PLM, invested in the MES (acquisition of Visiprise), verticalized its MRO solution, etc.

The increasing demand for these tools meet the need for manufacturers to gain flexibility, productivity and quality while reducing costs and complying with regulations. To achieve these primary objectives, these different tools positioned on the value chain must communicate. The first step is the simple exchange of data, but this may be through the implementation of SOA technologies or work on repositories with MDM technologies. If we take the example of Airbus, even in the functional area of PLM, the company uses many different tools and versions (SAP, Dassault, PTC, etc).

Thus, even in the manufacturing industry, which is considered as mature, there are still opportunities in a context of rationalization around the standard .... In order to reach these core industry needs, SAP will have to work closely with its partners which have niche competencies, and this new solution with HCL Axon is an excellent example.