ingham, MA). In its “Cloud Computing in Manu- facturing” IDC Manufacturing Insights report, IDC found that 44.3% of manufacturing companies either have implemented or were evaluating cloud deploy- ments, while 22% already have installed cloud-based systems.
Moving Manufacturing to the Cloud ERP software developer Plex Systems Inc. (Auburn Hills, MI) has offered cloud-based systems exclusively for the last 12 years, said Patrick Fetterman, Plex Systems vice president, marketing. The 17-year-old company specializes in offering Plex Online, a SaaS/ cloud-based ERP system, to manufacturers in a wide range of industries including automotive, aerospace/ defense builders, food and beverage, medical device manufacturers and metalforming operations. “The term ‘in the cloud’ means a lot of different things to different people,” said Fetterman. “The first, and the easiest, step into cloud computing is what we call IAAS, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service. In this case, you still own the applications, but the hardware infrastructure is owned by somebody else.” Other models include Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which also offers users an application development
environment. “The third level and the one in where my company’s involved is Software-as-a-Service [SaaS]. This means we own everything up into the data in those accounts,” Fetterman said. “We own the soft- ware, and our customers simply access the software, they pay for access to it. They own their own data, they own control of the user accounts, etc., and everything else is controlled by the software as a service provider.” Several key technology and market forces coalesced to create an environment conducive for cloud comput- ing, Fetterman said. These factors include Moore’s Law, the phenomenon of computing power doubling every 18 months; virtualization, the ability to build large net- work infrastructures that become virtual servers on the same hardware; and the rise of data centers that have become attractive to companies looking to cut costs by outsourcing IT operations. “All those things have put in place the structure to
deliver cloud services,” Fetterman said, “and it just happened to take place at the time there were a bunch of market forces pushing it all in the same direction. We all know that IT budgets have been cut dramati- cally and resources have been cut dramatically—no IT department is the same size it was even three or four years ago.” Today, Plex Online includes triple-redundant systems, including a hot-standby-fail data center in Asheville, NC, to deal with any potential network out- ages, Fetterman said. “Most of our customers, because it is a mission-critical system to them—our system goes down, they stop manufacturing in the plants— will engineer a second redundant Internet connection between us and their factories. That kind of activity has gotten so inexpensive, you can put in a T1 for a few hundred dollars a month. “If our system is down, factories close. Even in the
The cloud-based Plex Online ERP offers shop managers a manufacturing-centric view of plant-floor operations.
Image courtesy Plex Systems Inc.
power outage that hit the East Coast in 2003, our data center was up and running, and if our customers had power, they could get access to the Internet and use the system.”
mfgengmedia.org SS23
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132