It has become almost an article of faith that mid-size manufacturing companies, particularly those with little or no IT staff, need highly packaged systems that require little human intervention to run. This requirement has been at the center of the emerging value proposition for the so-called software-as-a-service application model, popularized by salesforce.com in the customer relationship management (CRM) market and now the subject of campaigns by enterprise resource planning (ERP) suppliers.
One crusader in the ERP market has been Plexus Systems, whose Plexus Online ERP offering is now being accessed by some 30,000 registered users across roughly 1,200 plants. The Plexus SaaS offering encompasses such ERP functions as accounting, inventory, costing, and CRM, but also extends into the manufacturing execution and supply chain management realms.
Plexus Online has been adopted by manufacturing companies of many different sizes, ranging from $3 billion American Axle & Manufacturing, Inc. to $92 million FormTech Industries LLC, an automotive supplier. One of the things Plexus has learned is that even with the SaaS model, some companies need their internal IT staff to modify the system to suit particular needs. As a result, Plexus is testing what it calls a "rendering engine," essentially a tool set to enable users to modify and tailor screens and even develop applications. Plexus also intends to use the engine for its internal software development.
In a recent briefing, Plexus CEO and President Mark Symonds said the company came up with the idea for the engine about a year ago. "Engineering was tasked to come up with something revolutionary," Symonds said. "We had had tools to enable customization, but the rendering engine goes way beyond what we had." But Plexus officials see another benefit to the engine, one that addresses the needs of larger organizations with IT staffs. "This gives back some control," says Tom Mackey, executive vice president of sales. "There was a gap in the offering for big companies that needed to make a change in the software."
Plexus showed a test version of the rendering engine at its user group meeting in May. Although the engine was originally envisioned as an internal development platform, Symonds has high hopes for it going forward, even suggesting that Plexus may develop a separate business around it.
Meanwhile, Symonds says he's continuing to build out his management and sales team. In addition to Mackey, he has brought in Patrick Fetterman to run marketing. The sales and management expansion, he says, is needed to accommodate growth already under way at Plexus. The company pushed north of the $20 million mark in 2006, from just under $15 million the year before, and Symonds says he's planning for a 40% surge this year.
"The market has crossed the chasm, and is now on the uptake," he says.
This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of Managing Automation.