Apriso, a provider of manufacturing operations management software, has expanded its FlexNet family of products with a software module that supports lean manufacturing and closes the gap between enterprise and manufacturing operations software, the company said this week.

The FlexNet Lean Material Flow product is the result of a collaborative project with the French arm of Accenture, which as a systems integrator has installed the FlexNet platform in more than 150 European locations and contributed intellectual property to the new offering in the form of best practices gleaned from its lean manufacturing deployments.

The software, according to Apriso, boosts manufacturing operations management and execution by synchronizing material flows to eliminate idle inventories; improving global visibility and control; delivering integrated quality execution and packaged logistics with label printing and error proofing to cut costs; and reducing IT implementation and maintenance costs by integrating with material, quality, and production management applications from SAP.

While Apriso’s products primarily enable customers to design their own processes, this offering takes a different tack, said Yves Verergnolle, Apriso’s general manager for the EMEA region, by embedding logistics protocols in a packaged solution. Those protocols are based on tried-and-true processes and material flows inside plants, and enable “the most efficient, up-to-date way to manage in a lean environment,” he said. “These are out-of-the-box protocols that can be used anywhere in the world,” Verergnolle told Managing Automation today. At the same time, flexibility is built in so that users can adjust or add protocols to meet changing compliance requirements.

Accenture is the go-to systems integrator for FlexNet LeanMaterial Flow solution implementations, though customers can install the module on their own.

The companies designed the preconfigured module to be plug-and-play with SAP ERP, the predominant ERP vendor in Apriso customer sites. According to an Apriso spokesman, 80% of the company’s customers have SAP deployed in their organizations. However, FlexNet Lean Material Flow can be easily modified to work with Oracle or other ERP systems, the company said.

With an ever-increasing need to increase agility, manufacturers are seeking ways to tie their enterprise and manufacturing systems together, and ERP and manufacturing software vendors have been grabbing opportunities to cross into one another’s turf. Apriso’s partnership with Accenture is, in some fashion, a response to that trend.

“We’ve made a strategic decision not to offer ERP,” Apriso’s spokesman said. “You need a centralized architecture to do ERP right, but that doesn’t work for manufacturing, which can’t afford to have a network go down for eight hours for maintenance.” Instead, FlexNet retains manufacturing autonomy and stores its own data in case the network goes down.

The material flow software extends ERP’s value by “bridging the gap between a manufacturing enterprise’s business system processes (transaction-based) and its plant-floor processes (real-time) to improve manufacturing efficiency, quality, compliance, and agility, delivering a rapid ROI while improving cash flow,” Apriso said in its announcement.

Valeo, a $12 billion automotive supplier, contributed to the development effort and is using the module, Apriso said in its statement.