Manufacturing operations management software vendor Apriso Corp. today enhanced its core FlexNet platform, adding features that it says will make it easier for manufacturers to design, manage, and deploy standard business processes across multiple plants operating anywhere in the world.
The enhancements add business process lifecycle management features to the Business Process Management module embedded in FlexNet. The new features, for example, allow manufacturers to centrally test, validate, configure, and distribute standard business processes, supported by the FlexNet platform, among plants around the world. The enhancements also make it easier for manufacturers to control different versions of business processes and to retire them when they are replaced by new processes.
Apriso’s move to support central lifecycle management of business processes was driven by manufacturing customers that increasingly want to run globally distributed plants using standard manufacturing business processes, said Apriso Director of Product Management John Fishell in an interview with Managing Automation. FlexNet’s embedded BPM capabilities have enabled manufacturers to create and configure new business processes. Until now, however, FlexNet didn’t offer extensive tools for managing business processes created in FlexNet through their lifecycles.
“It has become increasingly clear that, like equipment and other resources, business processes represent significant intellectual property to manufacturers,” Fishell said. “So manufacturers are looking for something more robust with which to do lifecycle management of business processes.”