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, forming 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; however, the company is founded on a solid foundation of many of its staff's thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems. This continues a discussion of the market impact.
Further, the return material authorization (RMA) module applies the same level of quality management to returned items as is applied to production inventory, since inspection is required for all returned materials. The process allows users to dispose of the returned materials as scrap if they cannot be used, return them to inventory if they are still good, or open a rework order if they can be reworked. There is also the tracking functionality within the module, from assigning an RMA number for the customer, disposing with the samples (optional), receiving the returned materials, and disposing with all returns, while credit memos and replacement orders can be automatically generated if desired.
Delivering finished goods, packing slips, internal bills of lading (BOL), pro-forma and commercial invoices, and serial number tracking (among other features) are included as part of the shipping process. Tools to cancel, add, or reverse shipping transactions give users even more control over their shipping processes, which generate finished goods pick-lists based on user-supplied selection criteria. This operation can also automatically check the customer's credit status and the item availability before generating shipping pick lists. Logically, a report is generated that lists the inventory items that need to be pulled from stores, while shipments against sales order deliveries, inventory levels, and costing information are updated in real time.
As gleaned from its depiction so far, the Intuitive ERP system is aimed at the smaller discrete make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO)/assemble-to-order (ATO), and mixed-mode manufacturers with deal sizes averaging thirty users but moving toward the forty- to fifty-seat range lately. This brings us to the product's customer resource management (CRM) capabilities, which have been natively strong in terms of service and repair and of sales configuration. The capabilities for relationship management and opportunity management have traditionally been provided by original equipment manufactured (OEM) Best Software's SalesLogix suite, but the current .NET rewrite has also been leveraged towards writing these native CRM capabilities. Intuitive has consequently been selling its own CRM modules for about eighteen months now, and the 7.0 release includes a completely re-written CRM in a .NET managed code.
Introduced at the end of 2001 as an optional module, a web-based Advanced Configurator is aimed at streamlining the quotation and ordering of configure-to-order (CTO) products to deliver, on-the-fly, accurate pricing, product configuration and specifications, as well as BOM and process routings. It is a "bottom-up," rules-based configurator, providing point-and-click product definition under a rule and constraint-based guidance engine. It can be executed from any Web browser and allows the user to execute product configuration concurrently or independently in either client/server or "thin web client" environments—all utilizing one universal set of product configuration rules and objects.
The Advanced Configurator is fully integrated with the sales, inventory, costing and quoting modules of the Intuitive ERP system, thereby enabling both the user's sales force and customers to configure customized products, view design and pricing changes automatically as configuration modifications are made, thereby simplifying the collection and management of critical product data for sales and order entry functions.
Further, the return material authorization (RMA) module applies the same level of quality management to returned items as is applied to production inventory, since inspection is required for all returned materials. The process allows users to dispose of the returned materials as scrap if they cannot be used, return them to inventory if they are still good, or open a rework order if they can be reworked. There is also the tracking functionality within the module, from assigning an RMA number for the customer, disposing with the samples (optional), receiving the returned materials, and disposing with all returns, while credit memos and replacement orders can be automatically generated if desired.
Delivering finished goods, packing slips, internal bills of lading (BOL), pro-forma and commercial invoices, and serial number tracking (among other features) are included as part of the shipping process. Tools to cancel, add, or reverse shipping transactions give users even more control over their shipping processes, which generate finished goods pick-lists based on user-supplied selection criteria. This operation can also automatically check the customer's credit status and the item availability before generating shipping pick lists. Logically, a report is generated that lists the inventory items that need to be pulled from stores, while shipments against sales order deliveries, inventory levels, and costing information are updated in real time.
As gleaned from its depiction so far, the Intuitive ERP system is aimed at the smaller discrete make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO)/assemble-to-order (ATO), and mixed-mode manufacturers with deal sizes averaging thirty users but moving toward the forty- to fifty-seat range lately. This brings us to the product's customer resource management (CRM) capabilities, which have been natively strong in terms of service and repair and of sales configuration. The capabilities for relationship management and opportunity management have traditionally been provided by original equipment manufactured (OEM) Best Software's SalesLogix suite, but the current .NET rewrite has also been leveraged towards writing these native CRM capabilities. Intuitive has consequently been selling its own CRM modules for about eighteen months now, and the 7.0 release includes a completely re-written CRM in a .NET managed code.
Introduced at the end of 2001 as an optional module, a web-based Advanced Configurator is aimed at streamlining the quotation and ordering of configure-to-order (CTO) products to deliver, on-the-fly, accurate pricing, product configuration and specifications, as well as BOM and process routings. It is a "bottom-up," rules-based configurator, providing point-and-click product definition under a rule and constraint-based guidance engine. It can be executed from any Web browser and allows the user to execute product configuration concurrently or independently in either client/server or "thin web client" environments—all utilizing one universal set of product configuration rules and objects.
The Advanced Configurator is fully integrated with the sales, inventory, costing and quoting modules of the Intuitive ERP system, thereby enabling both the user's sales force and customers to configure customized products, view design and pricing changes automatically as configuration modifications are made, thereby simplifying the collection and management of critical product data for sales and order entry functions.
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