On April 1, Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, announced its ten-year anniversary. It was created in 1994, when the founders of the other ERP vendor PRO:MAN sold all interest in their company and started a new one: Intuitive. Since then, Intuitive has been offering enterprise software for small and midsize discrete manufacturers around the world with the flagship product, Intuitive ERP, which was designed from the ground up with 100 percent pure Microsoft technology and with well-established manufacturing practices in mind. The relative young age of the company has provided an organization and a development environment free from the burdens of supporting unwieldy sets of legacy systems and technologies; however, the company is founded on a solid foundation of many of its staff members' thirty-years-or-so of experience in manufacturing systems.
Intuitive Manufacturing Systems can be a crown example of a small vendor with brave and fresh ideas, which are by no means the prerogative of the biggest and the richest. Thus, Intuitive belongs to a group of a handful of vendors, which have chosen to rewrite their applications on a new, possibly future-proof, application framework. The intent of these visionary vendors was to address the ever increasing market awareness of the following facts:
1) that almost every business changes, and that software must change with the business;
2) even small businesses are really unique—one size can never fit all;
3) the high cost of development, support, and enhancements in term of money, time, and quality limit the ability of installed legacy software to meet many demands of business; and
4) that custom software is a requirement for many enterprises, even for the smaller ones. At the same time, these vendors have been maintaining or improving their functionality, although some observers may contend that their "bold" moves have been virtue made out of necessity.
The persevering tough economic climate may still mean opportunity for the nimblest companies. It appears that a large number of manufacturing enterprises within the lower-end of the market have yet to deploy an enterprise package, particularly in emerging markets. Some of them have cited the complexity of ERP and associated enterprise applications as intimidating and a deterrence to implementation. Still, like their bigger counterparts, smaller enterprises also have to efficiently run and expand their operations while maintaining strict control over costs and expenses; cash flow; and inventory turns and levels.
To that end, Intuitive is one of the vendors that has long attempted to mitigate the actual and perceived barriers to ERP acceptance by smaller enterprises. However, in a time in which many peer vendors had to backpedal product development and expansion because of market conditions (such as the post Y2K slump combined with the ongoing recession), Intuitive continues to pragmatically expand its product depth and breadth and geographic coverage, and renders itself as a more apparent ERP solution for the small and mid-sized discrete manufacturers.
Still being an ERP adolescent (given that there are many competitors that are a few decades' old) has been both the company's curse and blessing. The curse is that remaining a little, obscure, relatively unknown vendor (with an estimated less than $15 million [USD] in revenues) means still developing a client base and the global presence. On the other hand, coming later to the market has given the company the chance to make better choices and avoid the proverbial traps of many of its peers. Namely, the rapid pace of global business nowadays places a unique set of challenges on all enterprises looking to improve and automate their operations, and at the same time, remain poised to adapt quickly to change. With increased competition, globalization, and mergers and acquisition activity, enterprise software buyers increasingly realize that product architecture plays a key role in how quickly vendors can implement; maintain; expand or customize; and integrate their products. The product architecture is going to do much more than simply provide technical functionality, user interface (UI) or presentation, and platform support. It is going to determine whether a product is going to endure, whether it can be scaled to a large number of users, and whether it will be able to incorporate emerging technologies, all in order to accommodate increasingly evolving user requirements.
However, it takes excruciating efforts, industry domain knowledge, and resources (often estimated in hundreds of "man-years") to devise and build an enterprise system from scratch. Therefore, when that compelling new technology does appear, it is quite common in the industry for an enterprise application provider to surround its old ERP and accounting core software in a "wrapper" of newer technology, whose goal is to effectively obfuscate the old technology, giving it the latest graphical "look," or providing an easier means to access the core business logic and data from other, more-modern systems, devices, or from the Internet.
For a comprehensive discussion of the effort it takes to devise and build an enterprise system from scratch see Rewrite Or Wrap-Around Old Software?).
The precursor of Intuitive's ability to rewrite its applications into .NET was its choice a decade ago to use only contemporary Microsoft technologies and platforms. Written in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), straight Microsoft Visual Basic, and Microsoft Transact SQL (T-SQL) languages, using Microsoft Access as the UI for forms and reports, and exclusively Microsoft SQL Server as the database, Intuitive ERP has never been "corrupted" by other, now detractive legacy technologies (such as, Microsoft DOS or some proprietary database like FoxPro, Pervasive, or Progress). Once other proprietary technologies are introduced into the research and development (R&D) equation, any vendor has to deal with translation, interface, and performance issues, not to mention the pain of migrating existing customers or maintaining multiple product versions. On the other hand, using technologies that are intrinsically compatible should result in faster and less costly development. As a result, Intuitive ERP does not have to contend with technology conflicts, trade-offs, or inefficiencies resulting from mixing or wrapping technologies.
The company's strategic relationship with Microsoft has consequently proven to be of a great importance given its market segment's infatuation with the technology, whose performance, reliability, and scalability has long been improving as well. By leveraging the capabilities of the Microsoft platform only, Intuitive now seems to also be in a better position to be responsive by delivering new functional features that its customers may demand. In contrast, a smaller vendor that covers multiple platforms often spends more than a half of its R&D budget on porting issues; thus making a cross-platform solution remains largely the prerogative (and a consequent burden) of only bigger vendors.
Furthermore, the early adoption of the .NET platform should help Intuitive transition from a traditional two-tier client/server architecture (where the entire business logic resides at the client front end) to the one where the business logic resides in a set of business logic components that can be used by the rich UI, alternate UIs, or it can be integrated with other systems through Microsoft BizTalk, which bolsters the systems interconnectivity and flexibility. The framework should also provide a "hands and administrator free" deployment model allowing the application to be distributed from a single web site, while product updates, enhancements, and new releases should, in future, be automatically deployed to the client, which should allow businesses to cut down on expensive client/server administrative time.
Intuitive Manufacturing Systems can be a crown example of a small vendor with brave and fresh ideas, which are by no means the prerogative of the biggest and the richest. Thus, Intuitive belongs to a group of a handful of vendors, which have chosen to rewrite their applications on a new, possibly future-proof, application framework. The intent of these visionary vendors was to address the ever increasing market awareness of the following facts:
1) that almost every business changes, and that software must change with the business;
2) even small businesses are really unique—one size can never fit all;
3) the high cost of development, support, and enhancements in term of money, time, and quality limit the ability of installed legacy software to meet many demands of business; and
4) that custom software is a requirement for many enterprises, even for the smaller ones. At the same time, these vendors have been maintaining or improving their functionality, although some observers may contend that their "bold" moves have been virtue made out of necessity.
The persevering tough economic climate may still mean opportunity for the nimblest companies. It appears that a large number of manufacturing enterprises within the lower-end of the market have yet to deploy an enterprise package, particularly in emerging markets. Some of them have cited the complexity of ERP and associated enterprise applications as intimidating and a deterrence to implementation. Still, like their bigger counterparts, smaller enterprises also have to efficiently run and expand their operations while maintaining strict control over costs and expenses; cash flow; and inventory turns and levels.
To that end, Intuitive is one of the vendors that has long attempted to mitigate the actual and perceived barriers to ERP acceptance by smaller enterprises. However, in a time in which many peer vendors had to backpedal product development and expansion because of market conditions (such as the post Y2K slump combined with the ongoing recession), Intuitive continues to pragmatically expand its product depth and breadth and geographic coverage, and renders itself as a more apparent ERP solution for the small and mid-sized discrete manufacturers.
Still being an ERP adolescent (given that there are many competitors that are a few decades' old) has been both the company's curse and blessing. The curse is that remaining a little, obscure, relatively unknown vendor (with an estimated less than $15 million [USD] in revenues) means still developing a client base and the global presence. On the other hand, coming later to the market has given the company the chance to make better choices and avoid the proverbial traps of many of its peers. Namely, the rapid pace of global business nowadays places a unique set of challenges on all enterprises looking to improve and automate their operations, and at the same time, remain poised to adapt quickly to change. With increased competition, globalization, and mergers and acquisition activity, enterprise software buyers increasingly realize that product architecture plays a key role in how quickly vendors can implement; maintain; expand or customize; and integrate their products. The product architecture is going to do much more than simply provide technical functionality, user interface (UI) or presentation, and platform support. It is going to determine whether a product is going to endure, whether it can be scaled to a large number of users, and whether it will be able to incorporate emerging technologies, all in order to accommodate increasingly evolving user requirements.
However, it takes excruciating efforts, industry domain knowledge, and resources (often estimated in hundreds of "man-years") to devise and build an enterprise system from scratch. Therefore, when that compelling new technology does appear, it is quite common in the industry for an enterprise application provider to surround its old ERP and accounting core software in a "wrapper" of newer technology, whose goal is to effectively obfuscate the old technology, giving it the latest graphical "look," or providing an easier means to access the core business logic and data from other, more-modern systems, devices, or from the Internet.
For a comprehensive discussion of the effort it takes to devise and build an enterprise system from scratch see Rewrite Or Wrap-Around Old Software?).
The precursor of Intuitive's ability to rewrite its applications into .NET was its choice a decade ago to use only contemporary Microsoft technologies and platforms. Written in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), straight Microsoft Visual Basic, and Microsoft Transact SQL (T-SQL) languages, using Microsoft Access as the UI for forms and reports, and exclusively Microsoft SQL Server as the database, Intuitive ERP has never been "corrupted" by other, now detractive legacy technologies (such as, Microsoft DOS or some proprietary database like FoxPro, Pervasive, or Progress). Once other proprietary technologies are introduced into the research and development (R&D) equation, any vendor has to deal with translation, interface, and performance issues, not to mention the pain of migrating existing customers or maintaining multiple product versions. On the other hand, using technologies that are intrinsically compatible should result in faster and less costly development. As a result, Intuitive ERP does not have to contend with technology conflicts, trade-offs, or inefficiencies resulting from mixing or wrapping technologies.
The company's strategic relationship with Microsoft has consequently proven to be of a great importance given its market segment's infatuation with the technology, whose performance, reliability, and scalability has long been improving as well. By leveraging the capabilities of the Microsoft platform only, Intuitive now seems to also be in a better position to be responsive by delivering new functional features that its customers may demand. In contrast, a smaller vendor that covers multiple platforms often spends more than a half of its R&D budget on porting issues; thus making a cross-platform solution remains largely the prerogative (and a consequent burden) of only bigger vendors.
Furthermore, the early adoption of the .NET platform should help Intuitive transition from a traditional two-tier client/server architecture (where the entire business logic resides at the client front end) to the one where the business logic resides in a set of business logic components that can be used by the rich UI, alternate UIs, or it can be integrated with other systems through Microsoft BizTalk, which bolsters the systems interconnectivity and flexibility. The framework should also provide a "hands and administrator free" deployment model allowing the application to be distributed from a single web site, while product updates, enhancements, and new releases should, in future, be automatically deployed to the client, which should allow businesses to cut down on expensive client/server administrative time.
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