In its continuing efforts to deliver best-of-breed enterprise applications to a diverse range of industries, Lawson Software yesterday announced the general availability of its QuickStep Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software product.
Developed to work across a broad swath of industries, from manufacturers to services companies, QuickStep EAM is a stand-alone version of the EAM application in Lawson's M3 ERP suite for manufacturers. The M3 product grew out of the technology Lawson acquired in its protracted buyout of mid-market ERP specialist Intentia, completed in April 2006.
For manufacturing organizations, QuickStep EAM is said to offer a more user-friendly implementation — courtesy of a preconfigured database and modules — than the EAM module within the company's main M3 ERP product. Thus, said Brian Dunks, senior product manager for EAM at Lawson, the market for the product resides mostly outside of the M3 user base. This includes mid-market manufacturers looking for a new or updated EAM system and customers of the S3 ERP suite, an ERP product for mostly service-based companies, that want to add asset management capabilities to their IT systems.
"We've used our experience and we've preconfigured most of the things that the typical customer will want ... so that rather than starting from scratch, they have a bit of a running start," Dunks told Managing Automation today.
QuickStep EAM comprises a number of core modules:
- Equipment and Component Control: Essentially the engineer's asset register, it identifies all the equipment within the plant or enterprise and includes technical information and spare parts associated with each asset.
- Preventative Maintenance: Helps a company manage its routine maintenance, including scheduled equipment inspections, statutory checks, and other tasks.
- Work Order Processing: Allows supervisors to manage the work done by maintenance staff. Lawson has preconfigured the software for a basic work request function that lets a user anywhere in the business create a work request. Work tickets can be approved and updated via this module.
- Maintenance Performance and Costing: Evaluates each asset's performance, as well as the work done by the maintenance teams.
- Diagnostics: Geared to help a maintenance organization monitor how well it is performing against its strategy, this module will not be part of most initial QuickStep implementations, according to Dunks. Once companies have built up a data history that can serve as statistical information, they may choose to turn on this functionality.
In addition to these core modules, Lawson offers an inventory and procurement application configured around managing spare parts for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), plus functionality to support more advanced processes, such as warranty management, document management, and database maintenance.
To accommodate companies with more progressive
preventative maintenance procedures, QuickStep EAM — like its M3 parent — is built on what Lawson described as an open architecture and comes with packaged application programming interfaces (APIs) that IT staff can use to create integration with plant floor devices. Dunks pointed to a utilities company in Sweden that has customized its M3 EAM application to tap into its
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) for real-time data. That information then triggers the Lawson system to schedule maintenance based on how long a machine has been active.
A Japanese manufacturer, which Dunks declined to identify, has also used the API to create a more progressive maintenance function. The company, which uses the M3 asset management product, has developed a system by which a robot on the plant floor can automatically trigger a work request in the Lawson application when the robot's internal diagnostics program detects a need for maintenance or repair.
The speed that Lawson touts for QuickStep EAM implementations derives in large part from a preconfigured database that comes with the product. Dunks said the database obviates the need for the IT department — or Lawson's professional services team — to create basic orders and coding structures, for example, because those are already loaded in the database.
Another time saver, according to the company, is the text- and video-based training material that accompanies the QuickStep suite and shows end users in an organization how the applications work.
The market for asset management products is on the rise, according to analyst reports. In a research note last year, Alison Smith of AMR Research noted that attrition among the ranks of maintenance personnel was a strong motivator in getting manufacturers to adopt automated solutions that can make more efficient use of existing MRO staffers.
A March 2007 study by Houghton LeRoy, a research director with ARC Advisory Group, found that the market for EAM applications would grow at a compounded annual rate of 7.6% for the next several years, topping $2.1 billion in 2011. "Many business improvements and cost benefits are possible by properly implementing EAM for asset-intensive operations," LeRoy wrote recently in reference to Lawson's announcement.
For now, QuickStep EAM is deployed solely as an on-premises product. "There could be potential in the future for doing some form of hosting-type solution, but we're not planning for that for EAM at the moment," Dunks said. All modules are installed up front, but customers license only those that they use and can turn on additional functionality as needed, he noted. Lawson did not discuss pricing for the new product.
QuickStep EAM is live at one customer site: Swedish metals manufacturer Hoganas AB, which switched to Lawson from another EAM vendor. More implementations are currently in the deployment stage, according to Dunks.
To date, Lawson has released
QuickStep ERP offerings tailored to food and beverage companies, apparel makers, distribution companies, and hospitals. More are in the offing, though officials declined to provide details.