Manufacturing operations management software provider Apriso announced what it called a significant update to its flagship FlexNet offering this week, touting improved process mapping capabilities that the vendor said will help bridge the divide between manufacturing operations personnel and the IT staff tasked with configuring their manufacturing software.
Inside a typical manufacturing organization, those two constituencies might not be “on the best terms,” Apriso President and CEO Jim Henderson said in an interview Wednesday. But they must collaborate when rolling out a manufacturing operations management or MES software package, a process that FlexNet 9.5 aims to better facilitate by way of new and enhanced process blueprinting and prototyping tools. The business process management upgrades also include “improved monitoring and process visualization for multi-plant deployments,” Apriso said in a statement.
Out of the box, the typical FlexNet deployment covers approximately 85% of a manufacturer’s processes. Configuring the remaining processes falls to operations staff, who must describe their business specifications, and IT engineers, who must translate them into software processes. Updating the software as the business changes and processes morph with it involves the same rigmarole.
“There used to have to be a lot of iterations” during that process, Henderson said of the FlexNet software. “It will cut down, we think dramatically, on the reconfiguration part of our implementation cycle,” as well as the time it takes to adjust the software to new conditions.