At a recent Rockwell conference in Orlando, noted author Geoffrey Moore ("Crossing the Chasm") remarked that the growing success of automation integration has forced a "new metaphor for running a business efficiently: search." For 20 years the foundation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, database technology, has generated so many data-generating nodes that the real need becomes finding answers fast through search mechanisms. The answers exist in all those piles of data, but finding them is the chore. In the near future, getting answers quickly through search will move to the top of the prerequisites for efficient manufacturing operations.
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