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.