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.

The warehouse management system, Wright said, goes beyond managing people and equipment in the warehouse via such conventional functions as receiving, picking, put-away, shipping, and cycle counting — all of which are core to the product. Indeed, it also includes support for RFID-based material or component traceability; direct integration with ERP systems and warehouse equipment, including AGVs, carousels, and automated storage and retrieval systems; metrics such as overall effectiveness of warehouse equipment; and tasking for warehouse personnel.

Where the system earns its stripes for lean manufacturers, he said, is in its ability to synchronize raw materials in the warehouse with production flow in the manufacturing facility, helping manufacturers avoid scheduling bottlenecks that can derail lean efforts. The synchronization includes tracking the progression of subassembly to assembly and managing material on the shop floor as its moves from one work center to another, in addition to weighing and dispending for life sciences companies.

It also includes the ability to direct and track the flow of materials to the shop floor just in time, complementing kanban, sequencing, and kitting processes that aim to reduce inventory and work in process. In addition, FlexNet Warehouse Management includes the ability to perform quality inspection, smart sampling, and traceability from raw materials, to semi-finished goods, to finished goods, Wright noted.

John Fishell, Apriso’s director of product management, said that the FlexNet product is geared to work with a manufacturer’s existing systems. “We respect that in a lot of cases ERPs are the masters of the data, and we built our system with that in mind,” he told Managing Automation. FlexNet is built to pull that data from the systems of record as it performs its warehouse and production tasks.

The practice of buying one application for production, another for warehouse management, and yet another for quality control creates an inefficient IT structure, Benzie said. But he also acknowledged that many of Apriso’s customers operate under such circumstances, and he emphasized that the FlexNet system can run operations in tandem with those applications. Manufacturers often experience a pain point in one of those systems, he said, and that’s what gets Apriso and FlexNet a foot in the door, he explained.

Since its 2003 relaunch as Apriso and the simultaneous rollout of its SOA-based FlexNet system, the company has expanded its functional offerings beyond its manufacturing execution roots to include production, maintenance, warehouse, quality, and time & labor.