The Late Breaking News™
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ERP: SAP Invests In PPLM Vendor Conformia - SAP has announced it has made a minority investment in Conformia Software Inc. Conformia develops enterprise solutions for product and process lifecycle management (PPLM) across regulated process manufacturing industries, such as life sciences and alcoholic beverages. The announcement marks the fourth investment for SAP's $125 million global SAP NetWeaver Fund designed to assist partners develop innovative solutions built on the SAP NetWeaver platform. This announcement was made at Software 2007, held in Santa Clara, Calif, May 8 – 9. Conformia is emerging as a market leader and innovator of PPLM. Conformia's enterprise-wide solutions enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology development organizations to accelerate development from candidate to commercial production, improve pipeline productivity and time to market – all at a lower total cost of ownership across the product and process development lifecycle. As part of this industry expertise, Conformia continues to forge deeper understanding and clarification of key guidelines between the industry and the Food and Drug Administration through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement focused on the challenges and opportunities in pharmaceutical development, such as Quality by Design.

For the alcoholic beverage industry, Conformia provides a global, enterprise-wide, Web-based software platform to effectively manage, monitor and analyze spirits, wine and beer production and compliance from incoming raw materials to bottling. The company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, received "Powered by SAP NetWeaver®" status for its Scale Up Management System (SUMS), an enterprise solution for pharmaceutical and biotechnology development operations. As a result, customers can rapidly deploy SUMS within environments using the SAP NetWeaver platform and access SUMS functionality within the SAP NetWeaver® Portal.