DEC and IBM have been beaten by Perot Systems Corp to a $26m computer integrated manufacturing contract: Computer Systems News says that the large textiles company, Springs Industries Inc, is breaking a long-term IBM habit and installing DEC hardware to computerise its manufacturing processes; the $26m includes $13m of DEC VAXes, $1.2m of Computer Integrated Manufacturing software from Cincom Systems Inc, and $650,000 of shop floor software from Consilium Inc; Springs Industries Inc was negotiating with DEC initially, but Perot Systems Corp won the contract because DEC’s price was too high; IBM was excluded because Spring believes that IBM has no experience in computer integrated manufacturing, and despite the company’s Blue history, it is replacing existing IBM mainframes with DEC equipment.
