Quite opposite from playing an April Fool's trick, 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. Namely, in 1994, the founders of the other ERP vendor PRO:MAN sold all interest in the 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; nonetheless, the company is founded on a solid foundation with many of its staff having thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems.
Intuitive's first product, MRP9000 (renamed into Intuitive ERP in June 2000), was built around the concept that the software should support standard business practices and that the underlying technology should be flexible and affordable. Hence, standard manufacturing and accounting practices such as those prescribed by American Production & Inventory Control Society (APICS) and Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP) were the building blocks of the product. The product has since matured into a broad ERP software system designed to manage most aspects of a small and mid-size manufacturing organization. Today, Intuitive has over 900 customers worldwide, in industries ranging from aerospace to bicycle parts, from circuit boards to boat docks. The Intuitive ERP product is also installed in over twenty countries, is available in sixteen languages, is fully multicurrency-enabled, and is supported by a network of direct offices and business partners worldwide.
Yet, Intuitive continues to pragmatically expand its operations and to unveil significant enhancements to its latest product release. Intutive's founder and co-chairman, J. Patrick Carey, had worked in the industry in various sales, service and consulting capacities for over fifteen years before he founded PRO:MAN in 1981, which was a provider of a PICK/UNIX-based manufacturing software system for small and mid-sized manufacturers. In 1994, Carey sold off his interest in the company, but, with his retained knowledge of manufacturing, he established Intuitive Manufacturing Systems.
According to the vendor's CEO Sara Gillam, back in 1994 the management had to decide between the status quo of a maturing UNIX system and putting a Microsoft Windows wrapper/fa�ade around that aging technology, or making the bold step of completely reengineering the product in the Windows environment. The apparent choice was aimed at being on the leading edge of technology in 1994, but also now, ten years later, Intuitive is continuing this vision by deploying the new generation of software technology—Microsoft .NET. The vendor was indeed a member of the official Microsoft .NET Early Adopter Program which began stealthily in the early 2000s. While lately, many competitors are claiming to use so-called "fast start" programs to aid in leveraging .NET technology, Intuitive claims to have been there at the very beginning, at which time it did not see any of these ".NET evangelists" that are present nowadays.
With headquarters in Kirkland, Washington (US), Intuitive is located only a ten minute drive from Microsoft's main campus, and it continues to enjoy a close relationship that has allowed it to not only discern Microsoft's future moves, but to gain invaluable aid from Microsoft in leveraging its latest technology. For that reason, Intuitive feels very confident that it will be significantly ahead of any other ERP vendor in releasing a pure .NET-based solution.
To that end, after eighteen months of research and development, mid-2001 Intuitive completed a prototype of its Microsoft .NET architectural framework that takes full advantage of .NET, extensible markup language (XML), and the new features of Microsoft SQL Server, and released a plan to convert the entire Intuitive ERP product—meaning every business logic feature, every line of code—to pure .NET technology. With the release of Intuitive ERP 6.0 in December 2002, the second phase of this plan was complete, as it was likely the first ERP product to release several areas of functionality built on a 100 percent Microsoft .NET managed code architecture. Then, in early 2004, Intuitive announced the beta release of Intuitive ERP 7.0, the only enterprise software solution with a pure Microsoft .NET "managed code" (i.e., a new type of software that leverages a new .NET set of tools and prefabricated components) framework and over 50 percent of standard product functionality released in .NET, which has been generally available since March 2004.
This substantial product redesign should allow Intuitive ERP to take advantage of the many new features of the .NET platform, satisfy the industry's e-business requirements, and better position the product to adapt to even more advanced technology in the future. Intuitive is glad to be saying goodbye to the old problems of Component Object Model-based (COM) software that the development world has often referred to as "Dynamic Link Library (DLL) Hell" in the past, owing to objects' sharing, and unfortunate consequent inexplicable conflicts amongst these objects.
Conversely, IT departments will be able to appreciate .NET software by the .NET feature known as "side-by-side", which allows multiple versions of the same application to reside and run on the same computer at the same time. Namely, with .NET, one does not have to uninstall or upgrade an old version of a software product, since the new version can be installed right beside the old one, and the user can run them both until she or he decides to remove the old version. Also, much .NET software can be installed simply by copying files to hard drives, while .NET avoids the Windows Registry and its many inherent problems.
Intuitive's first product, MRP9000 (renamed into Intuitive ERP in June 2000), was built around the concept that the software should support standard business practices and that the underlying technology should be flexible and affordable. Hence, standard manufacturing and accounting practices such as those prescribed by American Production & Inventory Control Society (APICS) and Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP) were the building blocks of the product. The product has since matured into a broad ERP software system designed to manage most aspects of a small and mid-size manufacturing organization. Today, Intuitive has over 900 customers worldwide, in industries ranging from aerospace to bicycle parts, from circuit boards to boat docks. The Intuitive ERP product is also installed in over twenty countries, is available in sixteen languages, is fully multicurrency-enabled, and is supported by a network of direct offices and business partners worldwide.
Yet, Intuitive continues to pragmatically expand its operations and to unveil significant enhancements to its latest product release. Intutive's founder and co-chairman, J. Patrick Carey, had worked in the industry in various sales, service and consulting capacities for over fifteen years before he founded PRO:MAN in 1981, which was a provider of a PICK/UNIX-based manufacturing software system for small and mid-sized manufacturers. In 1994, Carey sold off his interest in the company, but, with his retained knowledge of manufacturing, he established Intuitive Manufacturing Systems.
According to the vendor's CEO Sara Gillam, back in 1994 the management had to decide between the status quo of a maturing UNIX system and putting a Microsoft Windows wrapper/fa�ade around that aging technology, or making the bold step of completely reengineering the product in the Windows environment. The apparent choice was aimed at being on the leading edge of technology in 1994, but also now, ten years later, Intuitive is continuing this vision by deploying the new generation of software technology—Microsoft .NET. The vendor was indeed a member of the official Microsoft .NET Early Adopter Program which began stealthily in the early 2000s. While lately, many competitors are claiming to use so-called "fast start" programs to aid in leveraging .NET technology, Intuitive claims to have been there at the very beginning, at which time it did not see any of these ".NET evangelists" that are present nowadays.
With headquarters in Kirkland, Washington (US), Intuitive is located only a ten minute drive from Microsoft's main campus, and it continues to enjoy a close relationship that has allowed it to not only discern Microsoft's future moves, but to gain invaluable aid from Microsoft in leveraging its latest technology. For that reason, Intuitive feels very confident that it will be significantly ahead of any other ERP vendor in releasing a pure .NET-based solution.
To that end, after eighteen months of research and development, mid-2001 Intuitive completed a prototype of its Microsoft .NET architectural framework that takes full advantage of .NET, extensible markup language (XML), and the new features of Microsoft SQL Server, and released a plan to convert the entire Intuitive ERP product—meaning every business logic feature, every line of code—to pure .NET technology. With the release of Intuitive ERP 6.0 in December 2002, the second phase of this plan was complete, as it was likely the first ERP product to release several areas of functionality built on a 100 percent Microsoft .NET managed code architecture. Then, in early 2004, Intuitive announced the beta release of Intuitive ERP 7.0, the only enterprise software solution with a pure Microsoft .NET "managed code" (i.e., a new type of software that leverages a new .NET set of tools and prefabricated components) framework and over 50 percent of standard product functionality released in .NET, which has been generally available since March 2004.
This substantial product redesign should allow Intuitive ERP to take advantage of the many new features of the .NET platform, satisfy the industry's e-business requirements, and better position the product to adapt to even more advanced technology in the future. Intuitive is glad to be saying goodbye to the old problems of Component Object Model-based (COM) software that the development world has often referred to as "Dynamic Link Library (DLL) Hell" in the past, owing to objects' sharing, and unfortunate consequent inexplicable conflicts amongst these objects.
Conversely, IT departments will be able to appreciate .NET software by the .NET feature known as "side-by-side", which allows multiple versions of the same application to reside and run on the same computer at the same time. Namely, with .NET, one does not have to uninstall or upgrade an old version of a software product, since the new version can be installed right beside the old one, and the user can run them both until she or he decides to remove the old version. Also, much .NET software can be installed simply by copying files to hard drives, while .NET avoids the Windows Registry and its many inherent problems.
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