New takes on emerging software
SaaS-based solutions, fresh spins on optimization create opportunity for innovative vendors
By Roberto Michel, senior contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2008 6:00:00 AM
The steady consolidation in the enterprise software industry hasn't driven choice out of the market—at least not yet. Software vendors continue to emerge by carving out new niches or by winning over companies interested in alternative delivery models for established application categories.
Take the case of iPurity's ERP choice. In some ways, it was driven by some of the same factors surrounding ERP selection in manufacturing—e.g., in-depth production management functionality, and certain vertical needs. But iPurity is far from your typical company.
For one thing, iPurity isn't a manufacturer—it's a construction company for clean rooms in the high-tech industry that uses lean methods to drive operations. Second, even though the company maintains a bare-bones office in Redwood City, Calif., functionally, it isn't based there. Instead, the organization is virtual, working in the field or from home offices using laptops.
This combination of factors—being a virtual enterprise, and wanting to apply manufacturing methods for installing clean pipe facilities—heavily influenced ERP choice, says Ron Nussle, Jr., iPurity's COO. On the lean side, it needed in-depth production management, and for both vertical industry and its virtual approach, it wanted ERP under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.
“When you're operating in a hyper-cyclical industry, you must have the ability to scale operations up very quickly—or down very quickly,” Nussle says. “That's why SaaS works well for us. We can scale up our use within 24 hours, and similarly, if our revenues were to go down, we could scale back down just as quickly.”
In 2006—when iPurity launched and began hunting for a SaaS-based solution—the biggest ERP vendors such as SAP had not yet unveiled their present offerings. According to Nussle, the search led iPurity to consider either a combination of Salesforce.com's CRM solution and partner solutions for manufacturing functions, or a SaaS-based manufacturing ERP solution from Plexus Systems.
According to Nussle, iPurity wanted a more prepackaged, single-vendor approach, so it went with Plexus. Today, iPurity's users access Plexus Online via laptops equipped with wireless broadband Internet access cards. They can log in at job sites, at home, or while traveling. Associated CAD, spreadsheet, or other files for projects are uploaded to the SaaS solution, so iPurity doesn't even have file servers.
“We operate under a total virtual business model,” Nussle says. “We made a decision to invest our resources in people, tools, and systems—not big, fancy offices.”
Filling the white spaces
Being one of the first SaaS-based, manufacturing-focused ERP vendors helped Plexus gain a market foothold. Software industry analysts call this a “white space”—a niche or delivery model not yet dominated by the largest vendors.
“We continue to see innovation around the fringe,” says Dwight Klappich, a research VP with Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm Gartner. “We would tend to call them edge applications, as opposed to being broad, deep suites of products. These are much more focused types of tools. They are on the edge, either addressing a very industry-specific need, or a focused kind of functionality that would augment another application.”
For example, says Klapplich, a relatively new vendor such as Emcien hits a vertical need. In Emcien's case, its software allows manufacturers of configured products to optimize which mix of features are the most profitable while meeting demand. In other words, Emcien didn't try to compete with product configuration vendors, or with functionality in big suites like ERP. “That, to me, is an edge application,” says Klappich.
Veteran software executives also see some niches remaining.
“There is as much opportunity today as there was five years ago,” says Stuart Clifton, chairman and CEO of New Momentum, a vendor of SaaS-based enterprise risk management (ERM) software.
Clifton has more than 25 years experience running software companies, having been one of the founders of Dataworks, a midmarket ERP vendor. Clifton agrees with the notion that there is still white space available for vendors with unique approaches. New Momentum fits the mold, he says, because its Web-based data mining technology allows users to monitor market trends to spot problems such as counterfeit parts—something current business intelligence (BI) or planning tools aren't geared to.
“We found ourselves moving into an application category is that is brand new, and that is reasonably independent of anything on the supply chain side,” says Clifton.
Cindy Jutras, a VP for Boston-based analyst firm Aberdeen Group, concurs, believing some niches remain ripe for innovation. In particular, Jutras sees independent quality management vendors thriving, as well as evolution in the manufacturing execution system (MES) market.
Some newer and established vendors of MES and manufacturing intelligence software are blending in aspects of corporate performance management to arrive at what Aberdeen calls Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), says Jutras. “We are starting to see a convergence between what we might call manufacturing intelligence and corporate performance management,” she says.
But make no mistake, Jutras contends, the biggest ERP vendors are only getting bigger, buying up the large BI vendors, as well as building out other functionality.
“The ERP vendors—the major ones—are going after all these surrounding applications,” Jutras says. “And it's an attractive value proposition for the end user—especially the smaller companies.”
Unique needs
When big vendors don't fill a need—either because the niche is too narrow for their attention, or smaller vendors have hard-to-replicate technology—the smaller vendors thrive. In iPurity's case, the unique need was SaaS-based ERP that held manufacturing functionality, and could be configured by nontechnical users, says Nussle.
The solution's “glossary” functions, says Nussle, allowed iPurity to easily change manufacturing terms such as machine center, operator, job, and part number to construction terms like job site, welder, project, and materials—such as pipe. The configurations were driven by simple changes to fields.
“We may have pipe fitters accustomed to working in high-tech construction using the system, and they see the same terminology they are used to seeing,” Nussle says. “They don't even realize they are using a manufacturing system. They think it's a management system for the construction industry.”
The purpose of this tweaking, says Nussle, was to organize the resources and tasks involved in installing clean pipe facilities so that projects could be managed under lean principles. For example, says Nussle, the information in Plexus Online supports “5S” methods for tooling so that needed tools are in easy reach.
Meanwhile, the material requirements planning in Plexus Online is used for just-in-time materials management. According to Nussle, iPurity's CEO Kurt Gilson was intent on managing projects under lean methods rather than the traditional construction project methods Gilson experienced before founding iPurity in 2006.
In effect, says Nussle, Plexus Online's production management modules have been used to manage distinct construction resources so they can be recombined under a “Lego-block” approach.
“We used Plexus to standardize these components and the process for selecting them. Then our 3D CAD/engineering group can put the components together in an infinite variety of projects,” says Nussle.
The SaaS-based system and the methods it supports yielded roughly a 40-percent average in labor savings for iPurity and 62-percent quicker installation time versus conventional methods.
Nussle says a smaller vendor such as Plexus tends to lavish more attention on smaller customers compared to the ERP giants, while also being able to deliver needed functionality in areas like global sourcing. He adds that iPurity did, however, carefully check the capabilities of the vendor, even visiting its data center in Michigan.
Automotive start
Plexus isn't exactly a new vendor—its history actually goes back to 1995, and its Plexus Online solution launched in 2001 after originally being developed as part of an internal project at an automotive parts manufacturer.
Today Plexus concentrates 100 percent on its SaaS-based solution, rather than the custom development and integration work it cut its teeth on in the early years, says Patrick Fetterman, a company VP.
Other established vendors also reinvented themselves around SaaS. In configuration and quoting, for instance, Firepond sold on-premise solutions for years, but in the last couple of years, it has focused on SaaS.
AssurX, says Aberdeen's Jutras, is a quality management vendor that has expanded via a SaaS offering.
Zontec, an established vendor of statistical process control (SPC) software, offers a Web-based SPC solution that can be delivered through portable devices like Apple's iPhone. Corbit Harrison, a VP with Zontec, says the product is an outgrowth of the Web capabilities found in its Synergy 3000 suite, rather than a reinvention of the product line.
Harrison points out that mobile access to SPC trends expands Zontec's appeal. “We're talking not just to the quality manager, but also managers in supply chain departments or risk management,” he says.
Innovation also is evident in new twists on well-established technologies such as optimization. River Logic is a newer vendor of strategic business modeling and optimization software. Under its founder, Robert C. Whitehair, who spent 20 years developing decision-support systems for major enterprises, the company devised an optimization engine called constraint-oriented reasoning, or COR, which captures expert knowledge and embeds it applications with natural-language user interfaces.
COR is the engine that powers River Logic's Enterprise Optimizer product, which models a company's constraints and business dynamics, and applies that base model to various problems, says Carlos Centurion, a River Logic VP. “It's a way to bring together a lot of approaches to solving problems in one place, with one representation,” says Centurion.
In practice, River Logic's software often is applied to higher-level business planning, or can work in concert with other planning tools that already provide demand or capacity plans, but can't address certain problems.
“It might be that they would like to optimize the demand plan for profitability of the product mix and the customer or channel mix they are going after, but cannot do that with the systems they have today,” Centurion says.
New Momentum's Clifton sees ongoing opportunity for vendors that can address unsatisfied needs. And with SaaS, he says, users can test solutions without the massive implementation costs that created barriers to adoption in previous eras.
“I think the SaaS model will be very invasive to virtually all aspects of new software additions,” says Clifton. “We will attach [SaaS solutions] to the existing application frameworks, but we'll get there coming in the back way—by users deploying tools for a specific job.”
