Acting on what it said was a growing need among its manufacturing customers, Apriso Corp. this week released FlexNet Warehouse Management for Manufacturers, a branded suite of previously disparate products that aims to create a more efficient marriage of warehouse and production operations.
The new Warehouse Management offering spans a number of functional areas, including warehouse management, quality management, and production execution. The twist is that the software focuses on warehouses that stock raw materials, component parts, and subassemblies that are fed into the production environment — not the more traditional WMS domain of distribution centers that stock finished goods.
“Were not out trying to sell to Wal-Mart and to manage their distribution center,” said Gordon Benzie, a marketing representative at Apriso. “We have no interest in being just another distribution center application.”
Instead, FlexNet Warehouse Management specializes in channeling the ingredients of production into a lean, or just-in-time, production environment. Delivering both warehouse and shop floor execution capabilities allows the product to make not just the warehouse more efficient, but also the manufacturing processes it feeds, said Tiago Wright, WMS product manager at Apriso.