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.In 1994, the founders of another 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, 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 still founded on the solid foundation of many of its staff's thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems. This article continues a discussion of the market impact.
While the initiatives covered in detail earlier on will, in our mind, help Intuitive create increased demand and acceptance of its offering in the target market, Intuitive will, nevertheless have to address many challenges in order to continue to thrive in this cutthroat competitive environment.
First one is the mere fact that the vendor is halfway within its product rewrite feat, which somewhat impedes the vendor's .NET awareness campaign to the prospective and current users' community. Namely, at this stage, the vendor can mainly target the IT managers by professing the many tangible benefits of .NET, such as ".NET-based systems will be easier to install and administer, and therefore cheaper to own over the long haul"; ."NET-based systems will be easier to secure against hackers, and will be less buggy and better behaved (e.g., without "Blue screen" mystery crashes)"; and "owners of .NET based systems will find it easier to connect their .NET systems to their trading partners' systems, wireless devices, such as, .NET makes it easier to conduct e-commerce, and to leverage information available on the Internet".
Nevertheless, as long as the "old" software is meeting business needs, new technology is not the change driver, which makes building replacement products on a new framework a higher risk strategy. Product functionality still quite matters and, while it is important for enterprise applications providers to implement the latest computer science "quantum leap", there is no guaranteed correlation between first-to-market and the ultimate success in the market. In fact, based on many experiences, one could even argue that the correlation might be inverse.
Still, while the evolution strategy might be safer in the short run for both the customers and the vendor, minimizing both investment and disruption, the evolutionary strategy has limits in how much can be accomplished. The existing product becomes a limit on the amount of innovation that proves practical. There are no definitely right and wrong answers at this stage, and every vendor has to conduct its own soul-searching and justification exercise for the direction it chooses. In the Intuitive's case, had it stayed within its legacy technology and just worked on functionally improving the product, it will have likely not have been able to release as much new functionality as it has in the 7.0 product release. That might become even clearer over the next twelve months or so as the vendor has been very carefully redesigning each section of the product as it moves to .NET, and the new planning, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) portions of the product are notably more functional than they have been before. The vendor claims to be selling and winning lately mainly based on functionality, and not necessarily on technology. Perhaps ironically, that functionality would likely not have been there if the vendor had not moved to the.NET Framework.
There is always the aspect of the future of enterprise applications, where Intuitive ERP and peer products are going to have to interact with people and, more importantly, with other enterprise software much better than anyone ever considered possible just a few years ago. Users will eventually need to be able to run their applications on devices like a smart phone, or to be able to process transactions automatically with their trading partners. Setup and infrastructure-heavy electronic data interchange (EDI) is eventually going to be replaced by secure transactions between systems that no longer need that "money drain" in the middle. As we move closer to these realities, technology architectures are going to make a huge difference in whether one is able to provide these new capabilities or not, and how quickly, easily, and therefore inexpensively one can do so.
Still, Intuitive will have to carefully introduce the remaining pure .NET software components into Intuitive ERP through the normal sequence of upgrade releases, whereby the current customer base would gradually migrate to .NET as the Intuitive ERP product will gradually be transformed to pure .NET. The transformation, which entails converting or rewriting every single line of software code and modifying the Intuitive ERP architectural design to leverage the many touted benefits of the .NET platform will not likely be painless for the install base, but they do not necessarily have to be quite painful either.
Upgrade challenges generally consist of two major things: database changes and modifications that the customer has meanwhile made that need to be upgraded to the new release level. Had Intuitive made significant enhancements to the sales modules in the older release on a legacy architecture, for example, , it would have had the same upgrade issues as with the 7.0 release anyway. However, since the vendor was able to do so much more with the new architecture, it will have eliminated the need for modifications in a lot of areas that its customers had modified in the past. And for those who still need to modify something, the new environment is quite faster (and therefore likely cheaper) to code, which should mitigate the upgrade. Additionally, the vendor has always, and continues to provide its customers with basically all of the source code. For those who want to, they have the tools available to them (and Intuitive will gladly train them) to control and perform any modifications on their own, without necessarily relying on the vendor if they do not want to be dependent.
Converting a software product to be fully .NET-based is a big effort, and any software vendor should not simply convert lines of code from their old language to a new .NET language, and recompile those lines using a .NET compiler. A wise conversion should also include substantial product redesign to take advantage of the many new features of the .NET platform, satisfy new Internet connectivity requirements, and better position the product to adapt to even more advanced technology that will appear in the long term.
For the above reasons, Intuitive might still have limited success convincing prospective and existing customers to go for the version 7.0, until the entire product is 100% rewritten in .NET. One could think of only a few compelling functional enhancements at this stage that would justify users opting for the product at this stage. In other words, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset might likely work against Intuitive at this stage. As a matter of fact, ironically, the product currently does not have the same look and feel, given that the .NET parts indeed feature the touted snazzy XP features, whereas the rest of COM-based chunks of functionality (e.g., purchasing, manufacturing, etc.) still exhibit the "boxy" Windows 98 metaphor.
Indeed, .NET technology makes it easier for developers to produce rich, vividly colorful UIs, since .NET makes it easy to use the new richer-detailed 48 x 48-pixel icons, color gradients that fade from one color to another, and rich and finely detailed graphs and charts. Also, .NET software is inherently speedier, especially when accessing Microsoft SQL Server databases, but it is not very likely that these will be compelling reasons for ordinary, non IT-oriented users to embark on painstaking migration path. Therefore, prospects may rather wait for the completely rewritten version 8 or later.
Intuitive will have to direct the prospects from only looking at the major new features of the 7.0 release and ignoring the hundreds of small enhancements they have also been made. As mentioned earlier, the vendor took all of the feedback for enhancement requests from all of the years of user group meetings, e-mails, phone calls, etc., which it has diligently logged and tracked, and consequently included a vast majority of those in the design of the 7.0 release. For instance, there have been 267 enhancement requests in the Sales Order Form alone, whereby Intuitive accepted 243 of those in the new 7.0 Sales Order Form. In general, there are very few users who span an entire ERP product. So, either a particular user's area of the product is new in the 7.0 release, or it is the same as it has always been. The fact that one half of the product has a new look and feel while the other half has the metaphor, at least at the user level, should not be a major impediment. The above combination of both functional and technological enhancements might be the order winner.
SOURCE :http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/intuitive-manufacturing-systems-shows-maturity-in-adolescent-age-part-four-challenges-and-user-recommendations-17358/
While the initiatives covered in detail earlier on will, in our mind, help Intuitive create increased demand and acceptance of its offering in the target market, Intuitive will, nevertheless have to address many challenges in order to continue to thrive in this cutthroat competitive environment.
First one is the mere fact that the vendor is halfway within its product rewrite feat, which somewhat impedes the vendor's .NET awareness campaign to the prospective and current users' community. Namely, at this stage, the vendor can mainly target the IT managers by professing the many tangible benefits of .NET, such as ".NET-based systems will be easier to install and administer, and therefore cheaper to own over the long haul"; ."NET-based systems will be easier to secure against hackers, and will be less buggy and better behaved (e.g., without "Blue screen" mystery crashes)"; and "owners of .NET based systems will find it easier to connect their .NET systems to their trading partners' systems, wireless devices, such as, .NET makes it easier to conduct e-commerce, and to leverage information available on the Internet".
Nevertheless, as long as the "old" software is meeting business needs, new technology is not the change driver, which makes building replacement products on a new framework a higher risk strategy. Product functionality still quite matters and, while it is important for enterprise applications providers to implement the latest computer science "quantum leap", there is no guaranteed correlation between first-to-market and the ultimate success in the market. In fact, based on many experiences, one could even argue that the correlation might be inverse.
Still, while the evolution strategy might be safer in the short run for both the customers and the vendor, minimizing both investment and disruption, the evolutionary strategy has limits in how much can be accomplished. The existing product becomes a limit on the amount of innovation that proves practical. There are no definitely right and wrong answers at this stage, and every vendor has to conduct its own soul-searching and justification exercise for the direction it chooses. In the Intuitive's case, had it stayed within its legacy technology and just worked on functionally improving the product, it will have likely not have been able to release as much new functionality as it has in the 7.0 product release. That might become even clearer over the next twelve months or so as the vendor has been very carefully redesigning each section of the product as it moves to .NET, and the new planning, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) portions of the product are notably more functional than they have been before. The vendor claims to be selling and winning lately mainly based on functionality, and not necessarily on technology. Perhaps ironically, that functionality would likely not have been there if the vendor had not moved to the.NET Framework.
There is always the aspect of the future of enterprise applications, where Intuitive ERP and peer products are going to have to interact with people and, more importantly, with other enterprise software much better than anyone ever considered possible just a few years ago. Users will eventually need to be able to run their applications on devices like a smart phone, or to be able to process transactions automatically with their trading partners. Setup and infrastructure-heavy electronic data interchange (EDI) is eventually going to be replaced by secure transactions between systems that no longer need that "money drain" in the middle. As we move closer to these realities, technology architectures are going to make a huge difference in whether one is able to provide these new capabilities or not, and how quickly, easily, and therefore inexpensively one can do so.
Still, Intuitive will have to carefully introduce the remaining pure .NET software components into Intuitive ERP through the normal sequence of upgrade releases, whereby the current customer base would gradually migrate to .NET as the Intuitive ERP product will gradually be transformed to pure .NET. The transformation, which entails converting or rewriting every single line of software code and modifying the Intuitive ERP architectural design to leverage the many touted benefits of the .NET platform will not likely be painless for the install base, but they do not necessarily have to be quite painful either.
Upgrade challenges generally consist of two major things: database changes and modifications that the customer has meanwhile made that need to be upgraded to the new release level. Had Intuitive made significant enhancements to the sales modules in the older release on a legacy architecture, for example, , it would have had the same upgrade issues as with the 7.0 release anyway. However, since the vendor was able to do so much more with the new architecture, it will have eliminated the need for modifications in a lot of areas that its customers had modified in the past. And for those who still need to modify something, the new environment is quite faster (and therefore likely cheaper) to code, which should mitigate the upgrade. Additionally, the vendor has always, and continues to provide its customers with basically all of the source code. For those who want to, they have the tools available to them (and Intuitive will gladly train them) to control and perform any modifications on their own, without necessarily relying on the vendor if they do not want to be dependent.
Converting a software product to be fully .NET-based is a big effort, and any software vendor should not simply convert lines of code from their old language to a new .NET language, and recompile those lines using a .NET compiler. A wise conversion should also include substantial product redesign to take advantage of the many new features of the .NET platform, satisfy new Internet connectivity requirements, and better position the product to adapt to even more advanced technology that will appear in the long term.
For the above reasons, Intuitive might still have limited success convincing prospective and existing customers to go for the version 7.0, until the entire product is 100% rewritten in .NET. One could think of only a few compelling functional enhancements at this stage that would justify users opting for the product at this stage. In other words, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset might likely work against Intuitive at this stage. As a matter of fact, ironically, the product currently does not have the same look and feel, given that the .NET parts indeed feature the touted snazzy XP features, whereas the rest of COM-based chunks of functionality (e.g., purchasing, manufacturing, etc.) still exhibit the "boxy" Windows 98 metaphor.
Indeed, .NET technology makes it easier for developers to produce rich, vividly colorful UIs, since .NET makes it easy to use the new richer-detailed 48 x 48-pixel icons, color gradients that fade from one color to another, and rich and finely detailed graphs and charts. Also, .NET software is inherently speedier, especially when accessing Microsoft SQL Server databases, but it is not very likely that these will be compelling reasons for ordinary, non IT-oriented users to embark on painstaking migration path. Therefore, prospects may rather wait for the completely rewritten version 8 or later.
Intuitive will have to direct the prospects from only looking at the major new features of the 7.0 release and ignoring the hundreds of small enhancements they have also been made. As mentioned earlier, the vendor took all of the feedback for enhancement requests from all of the years of user group meetings, e-mails, phone calls, etc., which it has diligently logged and tracked, and consequently included a vast majority of those in the design of the 7.0 release. For instance, there have been 267 enhancement requests in the Sales Order Form alone, whereby Intuitive accepted 243 of those in the new 7.0 Sales Order Form. In general, there are very few users who span an entire ERP product. So, either a particular user's area of the product is new in the 7.0 release, or it is the same as it has always been. The fact that one half of the product has a new look and feel while the other half has the metaphor, at least at the user level, should not be a major impediment. The above combination of both functional and technological enhancements might be the order winner.
SOURCE :http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/intuitive-manufacturing-systems-shows-maturity-in-adolescent-age-part-four-challenges-and-user-recommendations-17358/
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