Some early adopters embrace new technology just to have it, but not Molly Hunting at Shape Corp. in Grand Haven, Mich. Her feet remained solidly on the ground while she investigated the merits of some new software delivered as a service on the “cloud.”

Her employer, a global manufacturer of automobile bumpers and other roll-formed products, had been looking for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to replace its aging one and the patchwork of management software surrounding it. “We weren’t really looking for cloud computing,” admits Hunting, director of information technology (IT). “In fact, we were skeptical about it at first.”

In the end, however, she and her colleagues decided to try this method of delivering software as a service (SaaS) anyway, because the application itself fit the needs of their business perfectly. It would eliminate the need to buy, integrate, and maintain other software packages that would be required to add the much-needed functionality that other, more-generic ERP packages did not provide.

Hence, Shape joined a small, but growing club of small- to medium-size manufacturers who are using the cloud to outsource their IT infrastructure to specialists. This group is using the Internet to access a variety of manufacturing software, including human-machine interfaces (HMIs), manufacturing execution systems (MESs), and ERP applications.

In essence, cloud computing is a method for delivering a shared pool of configurable and elastic computing services over a network, such as the Internet. These services can include such things as computing capacity, data storage, and application software. The idea is to make the delivery of computing services comparable to the delivery of electricity. Rather than generating the service onsite, the user buys it from a provider, who invests in the means to generate it. The provider delivers as much of the service as the user needs, sometimes buying extra capacity at peak times from other vendors.

The most popular category of cloud services is the delivery of applications, commonly called software as a service, or SaaS. Providers allow their customers to access and use software over the Internet, thereby eliminating the need for the users to install, run, and maintain the application on their own computers. Although most people identify cloud computing with SaaS, two other cloud services also exist: platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Outsourcing ERP

In Shape’s case, the service is its new ERP system, Plex Online, which resides on the computing systems and data centers operated by Plex Systems Inc. of Auburn Hills, Mich.  Shape’s 1,300 employees access all business and shop-floor functions—from bills of material, to engineering change tracking and quality control to shipping—over the Internet. Through an investment in shop-floor integration, the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on the presses and other manufacturing equipment also communicate directly with the system.

CLOUD COMPUTING: See more stories on how cloud computing has the potential to “disrupt” other automation disciplines.

Consequently, not only is pertinent business information available to authorized employees, but manufacturing metrics also reach the right people as needed. Based on tool and machine utilization, for example, the system schedules preventive maintenance and reports the downtime and productivity data necessary for keeping efficiency high. It also either collects quality-control data automatically, or requires it to be entered manually before processes can continue, in order to enforce quality standards and generate a traceability tree.

When Shape’s employees use these functions, they are accessing the one and same source code that all of Plex’s customers use. “Everything is happening in our system, and we’re just sending HTML down the Internet connection,” says Mark Symonds, chief executive officer (CEO) and president of Plex Systems. He explains that the software can do this with a relatively small amount of bandwidth because his staff wrote the application from scratch to run natively on the Web.

No disruptive migrations

Working with one set of code has a number of advantages. For example, it streamlines implementation. Users can turn on new features, rather than performing disruptive and oft-painful migrations. And the initial implementation tends to be quicker. Hunting reports that Shape was able to install Plex Online in all of its locations and at two of its subsidiary companies in 10 months. When visiting other users while shopping for an ERP system, “we were finding ERP implementations that had dragged on for multiple years and still hadn’t completed phase one,” she notes.

Hunting is finding that adding sites as her company expands is even faster than the initial installation. She points to the ...