Smart SaaS

As part of Montclair Advisors‘ SaaS strategy work with several of our clients over the past couple of years, we have learned quite a bit about the specific requirements for large and small manufacturers who are evaluating SaaS-based ERP and MRP solutions.   For many reasons, the manufacturing community has been slow to respond to the SaaS and Cloud Computing revolution.  One of the main reasons we found was that because many small factories operate in low-cost regions of our country or the world, many don’t have reliable access to the Internet, which would render SaaS solutions useless.  But things are now changing and there are a whole new set of SaaS-based ERP solutions emerging on the market.

We were pleased to review a recent blog post by Derek Singleton at Software Advice, where he does a very good job of reviewing some of the latest ERP products that have made the move to the Cloud including Epicor, Infor, NetSuite, Plex and SAP Business ByDesign.

It is a great read.

Enjoy.

Kevin

Manufacturing software vendors are making aggressive moves to the cloud. In the past year alone, four vendors rolled out full suite Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings for the industry. That brings the current tally of full-suite SaaS players in the manufacturing arena to five: Epicor Express, Infor SyteLine, NetSuite, Plex, and SAP Business ByDesign.

The buzz around the cloud has manufacturers asking if a cloud solution is right for them. To help answer that question, I’ll explore the features and functionality each vendor offers, and the ideal target market for each. Many more vendors are redesigning their software for the cloud, but I thought I would spotlight the five that are already there.

First, here’s a brief introduction to the vendors.

In May of 2010, Epicor released Epicor Manufacturing Express Edition (Epicor Express), the SaaS version of their Epicor 9 product. Their SaaS offering was designed specifically with smaller job shops and manufacturers in mind. Currently, 70 of Epicor’s 9,500 manufacturing clients are working in the cloud on Epicor Express. The product is currently targeting a 20 to 30 day period to go live. That should be attainable for small job shops without complex data migration needs.

Infor moved their flagship SyteLine product to the cloud in October of 2010. Of their 70,000 customers, mostly manufacturers, 800 have put some of their solutions in the cloud. Infor takes pride in the flexibility of their .NET architecture and their ability to serve mixed-mode manufacturers. In future releases, Infor plans to expand multi-site capabilities, and expand their mobile applications.

NetSuite began pursuing light assembly and less complex discrete manufacturing customers in 2007. In June of 2010, they launched their first full-suite manufacturing offering to target mid-market manufacturers. As a pure SaaS company, NetSuite’s manufacturing clients all operate in the cloud. NetSuite currently supports multiple sites, multiple languages and currencies. In future releases, they plan to expand upon this functionality and target more complex manufacturing industries.

Plex was the first SaaS player to target the manufacturing industry with their 2001 cloud-computing debut of Plex Online. At their start, Plex targeted the automotive industry. Since then, the company has expanded into several other verticals. As a pure SaaS vendor, all of Plex’s 589 manufacturing clients are in the cloud. Future releases will focus on expanding global capabilities, and developing functionality for more vertical manufacturing markets.

The July 2010 release of Business ByDesign 2.5 marked the on-premise ERP powerhouse’s first SaaS move into the manufacturing market. The product hosts 250 customers, but we don’t have a detailed count for how many customers are manufacturers. Regardless, SAP has tremendous manufacturing domain expertise to incorporate into the product over time. In future releases, SAP will focus on expanding their functionality to cover mixed-mode manufacturing and engineer-to-order.

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