techsupport3977,
I would have to venture a guess to your latest question,
"We will not be linking to SAP for the initial project. Do you still see this as a major undertaking for our division?"
and say definitely "YES". In you original post you mentioned linking to "SAP, CIM, MS Access, SQL, ORACLE, XRF systems, OEE's, OEM systems, Maint PM's, etc" even without the SAP link this is a task and I am assuming that you are following an "Open distributed archeticture i.e ORCALE type or other" .
Again, LightHammer appears roubust and should mitigate the access/conversion steps yet it remains a considerable task. It is not as simple as loading it and then just getting information from any or all of these sources.
For much of our factory floor info i.e. from PLC's, we wrote programming that polled the PLC networks, collected the data and wrote it to an ORCALE DB on a periodic basis, This was workable as most reporting requirements were on an hourly basis so that real time links were not demanded. This was prior to the SAP implementation that made all of this information real time. Once this is accomplished the volume of data that can be referenced is tremendous, then developing methods of utilizing this information for not only reporting (which is past tense) but to interactively control process/work flow in a feed-forward manner is where the real "value added" benefit resides. This makes all of the upfront effort/expense worth it.
Opps, I actually do not know what your industry is?? The reporting capabilities are fantastic also!!
rvnguy