FLEXNET SOFTWARE DELIVERS BROAD-BASED LEAN SUPPLY, COMPLIANCE, RFID SOLUTIONS
World's First Event-driven, Real-time Distributed Enterprise Software Targets Enterprise's Entire Production, Supply Network
(Long Beach, CA - October 28, 2003) - The world's first enterprise software suite targeted at the full gamut of an enterprise's global supply, production and distribution operations was introduced today by Apriso Corporation. The suite, called FlexNet® 2003, permits supply and operating executives to attain real-time, fine-grained control of their people, processes, material and machines with a Web-based, distributed software architecture that is global in its reach, and scales without limit. It is the first software that offers a rapidly-deployed and turnkey means for instituting crucial strategic business initiatives such as lean supply, pull, six-sigma quality, adaptable business processes, compliance, and global tracking of material and resources, including RFID.
This announcement is being made today at a conference sponsored by Forrester Research in Boston (See the supplementary release, also this date, entitled "New Software Makes 'Dell' Business Model Possible for Any Industry, Company," which discusses the business implications of this announcement, and "Pechiney Capitalizes on Apriso Software for New, "Total Manufacturing" Solution").
FlexNet 2003 is comprised of a collaborative family of language-and-time-zone-aware distributed management applications that interact globally in real time to orchestrate, oversee, and operate processes in production, quality, maintenance, material, receiving, fulfillment, and labor.
Each module operates based upon local process descriptions that can be tailored by those individuals directly responsible for the design or operation of specific processes within an organization. Any person, process, machine, or material can interact with the applications through industry-standard portals or interfaces, including full support for RFID technology.
FlexNet 2003 has been built from the ground up to utilize a Web-services, distributed architecture, and represents the most comprehensive implementation of any Web-services application to date. This architecture permits world-wide, instantaneous communication between any and all of an enterprise's production, supply and distribution processes, from the most atomic level to the most abstract, and thus enables the world's first truly event-driven enterprise software implementation.
Event-driven, Bottom-out Architecture
The implication of an event-driven architecture — rather than the forecast-driven architecture of contemporary enterprise software — is that the software can be used to immediately implement dynamic, adaptive, pull-based supply models, such as the Toyota Production System, or the celebrated Dell Computer business model, as well as produce all data necessary for the most stringent reporting and compliance requirements. Moreover, the simplicity of describing, reusing, and transporting processes makes successive-improvement strategies (kaizen), or dynamic, adaptive business processes, practicable, perhaps for the first time in an organization. Finally, the comprehensive support throughout the FlexNet 2003 suite for monitoring and reacting to quality events makes the suite unsurpassed for true six-sigma, lean supply implementation and administration.
Apriso is calling the architecture of its suite "bottom-out," in recognition of the fact that unlike the top-down, plan-based architectures of legacy enterprise software such as ERP, information in the lean, adaptive enterprise must flow from the bottom levels of the organization hierarchy — the supply, production and distribution processes — outwards to all other related processes, and, of course, "upwards" to the more abstract, and so-called higher-level business applications such as general ledger.
In addition, FlexNet 2003 offers a "bottom-out" implementation strategy. FlexNet can be introduced to an organization in a systematic, step-by-step manner, starting even with a single process or program, and then 'grown' outwards throughout the enterprise as experience is gained of the enterprise's processes are re-engineered for 'lean'.
"Apriso has defined a new paradigm for enterprise software, one which is particularly timely for the new, execution-oriented economy," said Greg Gorbach, director of collaborative manufacturing research at ARC Advisory Group, a leading industry analyst and consultancy. "Their event-driven, distributed bottom-out architecture is what companies need to re-invent themselves into the lean, demand-driven enterprises of the future."
The FlexNet suite represents the culmination of over 11 years of development, and the experience Apriso has gained in providing increasingly-sophisticated collaborative manufacturing software solutions to over 140 companies and 300 sites in 11 countries.
The FlexNet 2003 Suite Organization
FlexNet 2003 deploys strategically throughout the nodes of an extended supply network, embracing not only an enterprise's plants and warehouses but also key trading partner locations such as customer, supplier, contract manufacturer and third-party logistics sites.
For smooth and harmonious flow of operations between as well as within these nodes, the FlexNet 2003 Suite integrates four major groupings of software components: process design, process execution, metrics and analytics. These components are implemented as distributed, Web-services applications that drive processes from start to finish, while dynamically and instantly alerting stakeholders from workers and beyond to problems and bottlenecks as they occur.
The process-design components collectively are called the 'Center of Operational Excellence' — a term Apriso also applies to organizational units within the extended enterprise that actually use the process-design components (as well as the analytics components, described below). The "COE" software allows these organizational units — virtual teams of personnel drawn from all ranks of an enterprise and its trading partners — to collaboratively design, deploy and improve standard, re-usable operations and processes for use at each node, and to define organizational roles and performance metrics for use in real-time performance dashboards. These processes, roles and performance metrics may be deployed and used anywhere in the supply network via the extended Internet, together with an event-driven workflow engine, dynamic and adaptive Web portals, and industry-standard XML integration with external systems and machines.
The process execution components comprise a repository of business logic that is dynamically assembled, according to process designs from the COE(s), into event-driven applications that interact with machines and material to guide workers at each node through their tasks in real time, while coordinating the execution of these tasks throughout the entire supply network — locally or globally — using adaptive and paperless workflows. Apriso delivers a core repository of object-oriented business components and standard operations with FlexNet 2003 that is suitable for all industries. That repository may be quickly and economically extended to meet vertical industry needs, or the needs of individual enterprises, using the standard object-oriented principles of inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism.
The business component repository itself is organized into seven "Process Packs," covering production, quality control, maintenance, labor, warehousing, fulfillment and demand-pull (kanban) receiving. Each process pack supports anywhere from three to nine process types representing the diverse operating scenarios found throughout industry. For example, the "production" process pack — out of the box — understands discrete production, repetitive (schedule) production, sequenced (flow) production, assemble-to-order production, engineer-to-order production, outside processing, contract manufacturing, production campaigns, and project execution. Over 40 predefined, user-configurable process types are available; a complete list may be found at the end of this release.
The metrics components consist of real-time performance dashboards or "metric panels" that are designed by personnel who participate in the COEs. The individual metric panels are named after "best practices" including "Lean," "Six Sigma" and "Cost." Each of these has between seven and 24 built-in, real-time key performance indicators, having the ability to be extended in service to generate metrics and alarms from any operational data (See "Apriso's Real-time 'Performance Dashboard' Links Enterprise Plant Floor to the Top Floor", October 2, 2003).
The analytics components enable teams of personnel who participate in the COEs to continually define, measure, analyze, improve and control their operations and processes in order to enhance process reliability, economy and quality and to earn continual streams of benefits from on-going business improvement initiatives such as "Lean Manufacturing", "Six Sigma Quality" and "Cost Reduction". They also support a wide variety of archiving and compliance mandates, including full traceability of product and process genealogies to satisfy the growing agenda of warranty, international trade, consumer protection and environmental issues that confront today's complex, multi-tiered supplier networks.
Borderless, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, RFID, Wireless, and More…
FlexNet 2003 offers a comprehensive data warehousing solution that efficiently retains vast amounts of historical data, while keeping the data for current operations lean and up-to-date for maximum performance. The data warehouse contains facts and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) "cubes" captured from live processes, including the facts required by FlexNet 2003 metrics components, and allows quick identification of trends or patterns that represent conditions to be acted upon by a person or automated workflow process. FlexNet 2003 analytics components immediately create facts and OLAP cubes from arriving events, and store the facts as XML messages in the data warehouse. The difference between an event and a fact is that the fact encapsulates attributes describing the "who," "what," "where," "when," "how" and "why" about the event from the underlying FlexNet database.
That underlying database has a robust data model with over 26,000 unique data elements, and is available turnkey for the Oracle Database standard or enterprise editions, or Microsoft SQL Server standard or enterprise editions. Likewise, FlexNet 2003 analytics components integrate seamlessly with standard business data warehousing and intelligence (BI) solutions from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, SAS Institute and others to interrogate fact records, use OLAP cubes and maintain the event history.
FlexNet 2003 is one of the world's first fully borderless application suites that provides full multimedia and multi-language support, global calendaring and calendar availability, and event synchronization in multiple time zones. Multimedia support means that sounds, pictures, illustrations, flow charts or other such representations may be used for work instructions and on-line documentation, rather than or in addition to written instructions, such that varying levels of literacy may be accommodated within the workforce.
Additionally, FlexNet 2003 technology interacts with not only the entire workforce but also equipment and material through built-in support of radio frequency identification (RFID), as well as mobile and wireless devices.
Finally, FlexNet is built upon the latest, proven technologies that operate reliably at high volumes across extended networks, including secure Internet connections. Because FlexNet 2003 is a full-fledged Web services application suite built with advanced third-generation, multi-tier Web services technology, using standard XML messaging and object-oriented software components throughout, it scales out naturally across multiple servers per tier, location or node within the network for high performance.
Migration Path for Existing Apriso Customers
FlexNet 2003 interoperates completely with Apriso's earlier generation of manufacturing execution, warehouse management, time, attendance and data collection products. This permits existing Apriso customers to migrate smoothly from these prior applications to FlexNet 2003 according to their own strategy and schedule, starting at any location.
Availability
FlexNet 2003 is available now, directly from Apriso, under a simple and flexible licensing plan. The company has an extensive, worldwide direct sales force and local support teams, operating out of offices in 11 countries, including Brazil, Canada, Mexico, France, Poland, the UK, Australia, China, Singapore, and Japan. Additional information is available at www.apriso.com.
Apriso Partners
Apriso is a technology partner with Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, IBM, Matrics, RosettaNet, Intershop, and SKK. FlexNet has 7 certified interfaces with SAP, and is certified with Oracle eBusiness Suite 10.0.0.3. Apriso's service and deployment partners include Accenture, Altar Consultores, Brock Solutions, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Deloitte Consulting, EDS, EnteGreat, Eware System, Technology Solutions Corporation (TSC) and Value Network.
About Apriso
Apriso is the pioneer of a significant, new class of enterprise software that for the first time enables corporations to define, operate, and monitor supply, production and distribution processes in real time, without limits. Using an event-driven, distributed services model, Apriso's software provides such fine-grained visibility and control of both execution processes and key performance indicators that it is an ideal platform for accomplishing the most pressing business initiatives of today: compliance, product genealogy, in-line production sequencing, real-time, RFID-based asset management, lean supply, successive refinement (kaizen), six-sigma quality levels, demand-driven supply (the "Dell" model), and the adaptive enterprise.
Apriso's software, known as FlexNet®, integrates quickly, easily and naturally into an enterprise's existing software infrastructure, and effectively extends the scope of systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) into the furthest reaches of the extended production and supply network, as required. But unlike these systems, that are based upon a top-down, plan-driven operations orientation, Apriso's event-driven, process-based architecture accommodates any operational model that is based upon real-time collaboration between execution processes, real-time visibility into performance, or the requirement to define, refine, or immediately control workflows throughout the enterprise, and across borders.
Apriso was founded in 1992, and now operates in 11 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. World headquarters are in Long Beach, California. Apriso's rapidly-growing customer base of more than 140 customers and over 400 installations worldwide includes such high-profile, global companies as General Motors, Lear, Honeywell, Microsoft, Merck, Lockheed Martin, ITT, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, International Paper, Rubbermaid, Matsushita Avionics Systems, Saint-Gobain, Pechiney, and British American Tobacco.
The company has received a total of $20.9 million in two rounds of venture funding. Investors include Wall Street Technology Partners LP, CMEA Ventures, LogiSpring Investment Fund, SAP Ventures, and Brentwood Venture Capital.
Apriso Center of Operational Excellence: Portable, re-usable process definition, process control panels and performance dashboard definition and deployment.
Apriso Process Packs:
- Production Process Pack: Discrete production, repetitive (schedule production), sequenced (flow) production, assemble-to-order production, engineer-to-order-production, outside processing, contract manufacturing, production campaigns, and project execution.
- Quality Process Pack: Retest of perishable stock, receiving inspection, shipping inspection, stability testing, quality recall, and recall campaign.
- Maintenance Process Pack: Corrective maintenance, preventative maintenance, predictive maintenance, calibration testing, and service and repairs.
- Material Process Pack: Stores requisitioning, directed material movement, directed put away, directed pick, product teardown, material destruction, cycle counting, and physical inventory.
- Receiving Process Pack: Supplier release, supplier kanban, supplier purchase, resource requisitioning, receiving, inbound shipping, material returns.
- Fulfillment Process Pack: Customer order fulfillment, outbound shipping, customer schedule fulfillment, facility or warehouse replenishment, forward or active pick area replenishment, production line replenishment, and cross docking
- Labor Process Pack: Attendance, scheduling, and labor distribution.
Apriso Metric Panels:
- Lean: OEE, line balance ratio, TAKT time, 21 others…
- Six Sigma: Order aging, OTIF, quality rate, capable equipment, nine others
- Cost: Standard cost variance, inventory turnover, five others…
See also today:
"New Software Makes 'Dell' Business Model Possible for Any Industry, Company", October 28, 2003
"Pechiney Capitalizes on Apriso Software for New, "Total Manufacturing" Solution", October 28, 2003
Recently released:
"Apriso's Real-time 'Performance Dashboard' Links Enterprise Plant Floor to the Top Floor", October 2, 2003
All trademarks and registered trademarks are those of their respective companies.
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