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.”
For example, he said, Apriso has one manufacturing customer that runs 50 plants based on a fixed set of standard processes. Many such global manufacturing enterprises, Fishell said, are creating centralized centers of excellence to define and manage standard manufacturing business processes.
The new tools in FlexNet will support manufacturers’ continuous improvement initiatives, he said. Manufacturers will, for example, be able to take business processes used by better-performing plants and manage their implementation across a global network of plants.
Apriso has been testing the lifecycle management enhancements to FlexNet’s Global Process Manager at customer sites since Dec. 1, 2008, according to Fishell. One such tester is cosmetics manufacturer L’Oreal. Customers are expected to launch the enhancements in production sometime in March, Fishell said.
The enhancements to Apriso’s Global Process Manager are available to users of FlexNet as part of their maintenance contracts.