SDCExec.com |

Long Beach, CA, and Paris — October 7, 2008 — Saint-Gobain, a €42 billion industrial corporation operating in 54 countries, said this week it will expand reliance on Apriso FlexNet to improve quality and traceability across production and logistics processes. Saint-Gobain will extend its Apriso FlexNet installation to 19 Float Glass locations.

Saint-Gobain Sekurit said it has already implemented Apriso FlexNet across 44 of its worldwide sites, improving global standardization, quality and adaptability within mixed-use production environments. Expansion of the Apriso FlexNet solution into the Float Glass division is expected to provide continued process improvements, yielding higher quality and improved traceability. Saint-Gobain Glass said it anticipates its FlexNet deployment will result in a reduction in the number of legacy shop floor application, further reducing their overall total cost of ownership (TCO).

"FlexNet has provided the adaptability to support many of our manufacturing models, letting us replicate successful SAP/FlexNet environments with high volume/repetitive production to manufacturing environments that are almost entirely make-to-order," explained Pascal Ober, director of Competency Centers, Saint-Gobain. "Implementing Apriso aligns with our corporate initiatives to reduce IT cost. By standardizing business processes across locations, it has been possible to increase productivity through better business processes, while at the same time improve customer satisfaction. So far, we have enhanced visibility to production processes, reducing costs while improving metrics surrounding operations performance," continued Ober. "As we expand our Apriso deployment into production and logistics execution, I expect continued improvements in quality, visibility and production efficiency."

The Apriso FlexNet solution provides a platform to build "core" business processes, representing a collection of best practices performed at a plant or warehouse, which may then easily be duplicated across locations. Operating as an enterprise operations execution system (OES), FlexNet complements Saint-Gobain's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, creating a unified operations environment to continue quality and traceability improvements across production and supply chain processes.

Jim Henderson, president and CEO of Apriso, said, "The expansion at Saint-Gobain will continue to improve business processes, enhance visibility and deliver a substantial return on investment."