Apps for manufacturing may not be the newest development in the industrial space, but they’re still far from commonplace. If nothing else, development of apps like Opto22’s to help with control panel wiring and Iconics’ Windows 8 HMI/SCADA to full-blown ERP systems from companies like Kenandy and Plex Systems prove that apps aren't something just for your iPhone or Android phone anymore.
Recently I had a discussion about industrial apps with Chuck Olinger, COO of Rootstock, a supplier of cloud-based manufacturing and supply chain software aimed at small and mid-market manufacturers. He explained that Rootstock’s manufacturing apps address numerous functions ranging from sales and purchase order management to production engineering, material requirements planning and product lifecycle management integration. All of the apps, according to Olinger, have been developed out of Rootstock’s experience working with small to mid-sized manufacturers and seeing how many of them wrestle with the process of delivering automated work instructions to the floor and integrating data collection and acquisition into their overall production processes.
Explaining Rootstock’s relationship with Force.com (a cloud platform developed by Salesforce.com for social and mobile enterprise apps), Olinger says that using the Force.com platform, which also houses Salesforce.com’s CRM, sales and service, and marketing clouds, means that Rootstock can use Salesforce.com’s CRM information to create a sales order that will serve as the demand for what is to be produced and shipped. Olinger is quick to point out that users do not have to run Salesforce.com apps to use Rootstock’s manufacturing apps; it just makes it easier to integrate the apps since they’ve been designed for the same open platform.
According to Olinger, Salesforce.com is actively recruiting independent software builders to build and operate their business-oriented apps on the Force.com platform. “There are 100,000 companies using the Salesforce.com cloud,” says Olinger. “In the past two years they’ve really focused on bringing in other applications. The benefit is that with all these apps, if they’re native on the platform, the data is all in one common data store.”
Beyond the core set of 12 manufacturing apps Rootstock currently offers, the company is also working with manufacturers to further automate communications between machines and operators.
“For example, we’re working with a small machine shop in Toronto, Canada, which has a fairly sophisticated, almost lights-out machining operation,” Olinger says. “We’re talking with this company now about hooking their machines up to the cloud so that the machines’ status and cost information can be accessed. With this setup, by looking at our shop calendar app, you can see an automatically updated view of what percentage of your plant’s capacity you're loaded at.”
Once the machines are connected for this level of data viewing, Olinger says the next step would be to use the cloud for basic alarming. “If communication from a machine suddenly stops, it would show that there’s a problem by sending a chatter feed that could go to any device to reach the user anywhere they are with no special network needed.”
Olinger stresses that the manufacturing app market is still in its infancy, but that users’ opinions have already changed dramatically about the technology. “The first question we used to get from users about putting core apps on the cloud revolved around concerns about what would happen if their connection to the Internet went down or with security,” he says. “Those questions have largely disappeared, as people understand the dependability of communications. Smaller companies were once the bigger skeptics, but even that seems to have dissipated.”
Pricing is another attraction. Looking at an average mid-sized company’s use of a manufacturing software suite such as Microsoft’s Dynamics, Olinger says a company will typically have to pay about $250,000 for initial licensing and then $50,000-60,000 in annual maintenance fees. With Rootstock apps on Force.com, that same company would pay about $60,000-70,000 annually for subscriptions. And smaller companies can have applications set up for $25,000-30,000 annually.
