In 1993, East Side had grown to an 18 employee ship and realized that its manual methods of shop management were no longer adequate if growth were to continue without sacrificing quality and customer service. Job shop manufacturing software was needed to assist in: tracking jobs, managing deliveries and providing accurate machine shop costing. It was also beginning to become apparent that manual bookkeeping and accounting procedures could no longer provide the accurate and timely financial control that was necessary for a growing company.

A number of years ago, Loftness identified a need to upgrade to a SQL database, create custom reports, better manage data and expand functionality. The company also aimed to optimize SYSPRO’s functionality to enhance various operational aspects such as jobs processing, inventory transactions, sales order processing, and MRP. The goal was to institute training and process disciplines that would fully utilize SYSPRO’s capabilities, thereby ensuring inventory accuracy, smooth product flow, and efficient operations.

ProSiebenSat.1 Group, a leading European TV broadcasting, digital content, and e-commerce company, faced challenges due to its decentralized structure. Each of its more than 20 business units and subsidiaries had a tailored approach to software development and platforms, leading to varied IT environments. This structure, while allowing teams to drive innovation and growth, also resulted in similar IT challenges across the board. Fast-paced markets required rapid and creative content development, and competitive forces yielded cost and data protection pressure. Provisioning of new servers often took days and hindered business agility. Some teams turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to speed up time-to-market, but not all production applications were best suited for the public cloud deployments. Other divisions migrated to VMware-based virtualized server environments, and a few maintained bare metal and legacy compute environments. Emerging development teams leveraged LAMP stacks, node.js, and MongoDB. But with this varied approach, not all teams had adopted the latest IT best practices such as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and breaking IT silos. More recently, data protection risks caught the attention of ProSiebenSat.1 business leaders, most notably those using public cloud services. The company embraced strong data protection policies, but reliance on U.S. cloud providers brought security concerns.

The company’s engineering teams build infrastructure and applications that allow the business to deliver market leading digital content to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. This requires systems that rapidly scale, speed time-to-market, and protect valued intellectual property; all without exceeding target costs. Agile and immediate expansion of infrastructure is especially important for comprehensive sports offerings. “Demand spikes during important events can place a huge strain on our systems,” says the company’s Director of Cloud Solutions. “To respond to large-scale online requests, we often need immediate and sizable increases in application capacity.” Equally important to business success is enabling rapid development and deployment of new customer services. Continuous integration and deployment, now replacing waterfall programming methods, require elastic system architectures that allow for quick provisioning and deprovisioning of infrastructure based on developer needs. In addition to scalability and speed of development, new systems require strong protection of intellectual property to prevent cyber attacks. This means integration with existing robust security solutions. New infrastructure must also integrate with existing network and storage frameworks, and accommodate software development processes with minimal impact on efficiency.

Kwarter, a platform that enables clients to build second-screen apps for televised events, required a highly elastic infrastructure to meet extraordinary spikes in demand during major events like the Super Bowl and the World Series. The company needed to keep a large number of servers on deck and proactively address issues in production to prepare for every possible scenario. To maintain high performance even with heavy traffic, Kwarter needed to track and analyze performance data on all of the company’s servers in real time. They needed a tool that would monitor multiple dimensions of the Kwarter platform, including error detection, server resource monitoring, cache time monitoring, latency monitoring on the app server versus the database server, and a good network map.

Tribune Technology, a subsidiary of the Tribune Company, manages the digital operations of eight major daily newspapers, 23 broadcast stations and a number of national network site partners. The company serves approximately 400 to 500 million pageviews per month, mostly in publishing news content for consumers. The company's digital landscape is constantly changing, especially in terms of mobile websites and device applications. This results in an extraordinarily complex system that gets more complex by the day. Before using New Relic, Tribune Technology lacked the application instrumentation necessary to achieve real time insight into emerging issues. During production incidents, the company had trouble finding where application bottlenecks were occurring. The system monitors would fire, but the company couldn’t immediately tell what might be causing the problem. No consumer facing website can afford delays like that, so the company needed to find a more acceptable solution.

Next Update, a small company founded in 2008, developed a SaaS-based bug and issue tracking application called Sifter. The application was designed to simplify the bug tracking process and make it accessible to both technical and non-technical team members. However, the entire Sifter application and database initially ran on a single virtual server. This meant that even minor issues could impact performance or take the application offline. With customers in almost every time zone, this was unacceptable. The team’s initial objective was to improve availability, avoid downtime, and have more time and resources to enhance the application.

Uken, a cross-platform game developer, has eight games in production that have been downloaded more than 20 million times. The games are browser-based applications that push the limits of browser capabilities. The company processes about 800 Million requests each month. All common processes needed to run its games and business, such as user authentication, notifications, payments, analytics, and an ad platform, are pulled out and made into one of the twelve internally shared services. With self-imposed performance goals, Uken used basic tools and a few small Rails plugins to monitor and manage performance before they installed New Relic. This approach meant the team was spending valuable time performing manual work to determine what was going on and why some users were experiencing slow response times. The company quickly recognized that it needed some additional help.

ProSoft Technology, a company specializing in communication solutions for industrial automation and control applications, was looking to develop a new cloud-based communication platform for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. The company wanted to provide its customers with a secure, flexible, and easy-to-use platform that would allow them to remotely monitor and manage their industrial systems. However, ProSoft faced several challenges in developing this platform. They needed a solution that would allow them to quickly and easily develop and deliver new protocols, processes, and technologies that meet the needs of their industrial customers. They also needed a solution that would provide them with the flexibility to add additional services as their customers' needs evolve.

Cloud Provider, a cloud hosting, infrastructure, and services company, was facing challenges in offering scalable solutions to its customers. The company's customers, who are mostly not tech-savvy, were finding it difficult to migrate from a shared hosting environment to a virtual machine. The company wanted to offer a solution that would allow its customers to scale their operations without having to manage anything. The main challenge was ensuring the scalability of the platform, especially for stateful apps like WordPress. For these apps to function properly, it was necessary that the data volume is available to multiple physical hosts at the same time. This was a requirement that many storage vendors did not offer.

MightWeb, a hosting company, needed to instantly scale to meet customer demand, which was challenging for the many stateful services they offer like WordPress, MySQL, MongoDB, Magento, and WooCommerce. Most persistent storage options for containers don’t provide both high performance storage for applications like MySQL, and multi-writer shared volumes for WordPress, both hard requirements for typical hosting customers. They needed a solution that could provide high availability, the ability to take snapshots, and the ability to scale.

Lufthansa Systems, a subsidiary of Europe’s largest airline, provides IT services to the airline industry. Its BoardConnect product powers in-flight entertainment and connectivity for millions of airline passengers. The product requires a robust and scalable IT infrastructure that can meet customer demands for flexibility, robustness, modularity, and ease of use. As the company increasingly built its infrastructure around microservices and containerization, it identified a missing link – data persistence. The company needed a solution that would allow data persistence to catch up to the flexibility, ease of use, and speed that they needed to achieve in a containerized environment. The company also needed a solution that would allow it to auto-instantiate CMS environments on developer-committed projects and manage customers’ individual CMS production instances.

Naitways, an IT service provider based in Paris, France, was facing challenges in scaling to meet customer demand, especially for the many stateful services they offer like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, MySQL, & Redis. Most persistent storage options for containers didn’t provide both high performance storage for applications like MySQL, and multi-writer shared volumes for WordPress, both hard requirements for typical hosting customers. They needed a solution that could provide scalable, easy-to-use container-as-a-service offering and hosted web applications.

AGC, a global leader in glass, ceramic, chemicals, and electronics materials manufacturing, faced several challenges related to workflow and how users actively work with simulation tools and data. Sophisticated microstructure geometry designs needed to be modeled from the molecular-level up to the system level. These simulation models are very computationally-intensive and need to be performed continuously and across each step in the design and manufacturing process. Managing complex processes and workflows was further complicated by software updates. AGC uses a diverse suite of applications like LAMMPS, STAR-CCM+®, and COMSOL Multiphysics® to model different types of physics, and it was difficult to keep up with all of the software installation updates and maintenance. As a global enterprise with the highest security standards and requirements, AGC needed the solution to comply with the strictest IT policies, yet also simplify how users work with data and software tools and obtain resources. Other challenges included integrating security from the on-premise facilities to the cloud, minimizing data movement across the wide-area network (WAN) for hybrid cloud workflows, software licensing, accommodating complex, multi-step workflows, administration of policies, methodologies, software, and management tools, and future compatibility to enable breakthrough in areas such as machine learning and deep learning.

Amogy, a clean energy company, is developing an ammonia-based power system to fuel heavy-duty transportation vehicles as a solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The company relies heavily on computational research using high-performance computing to test multiple models under varying conditions. However, as the volume and fidelity of their simulations increased, they faced challenges in meeting their aggressive R&D deadlines due to long queue and solve times. They needed a high-performance computing solution that could be quickly implemented, did not require extensive IT support, and could support a variety of use cases.

JTEKT Thermo Systems, a leading manufacturer of industrial heating systems, is facing the challenge of making its products more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. This is in response to the growing demand for greener industrial processes and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the company needs to continue reducing its engineering and manufacturing costs while improving the effectiveness of its heating systems. The complexity of modern digital simulation and analysis models that guide research is increasing, requiring highly parallel calculations on the fastest computing architectures possible. JTEKT conducts analysis in four areas: thermo-fluid analysis, structural analysis, heat treatment analysis, and induction heating analysis, all of which require supercomputing capabilities.

Custom Profile, a profile extruder based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was in growth mode. They had recently moved into a newly constructed building, and the company was continuing to expand and hire new employees. But as its extrusion business naturally developed, it became painfully clear that Custom Profile’s enterprise software was failing to support its basic needs. The company was trying to run a competitive business through four different software systems. A combination of homemade software, Access™ databases, QuickBooks™ and Excel™ spreadsheets was resulting in several system crashes a day and costly data entry errors from duplicate information entry into both Access and QuickBooks. Additionally, customer service was struggling as sales orders took a costly amount of time to produce due to a lack of easy access to accurate production data, plus shipping was cumbersome, delayed or inaccurate. In short, the pieced-together legacy systems did not support the basic needs of a growing business.

Donnelly Custom Manufacturing, a short-run manufacturer, was facing challenges with its outdated OS/2 operating system and various software packages. The company's growth was outpacing the system's capacity, and the manual system of scheduling and managing the shop floor was becoming too cumbersome. The existing system's limitation on the number of people who could be in the same module at the same time had become untenable. Furthermore, Donnelly's customers and suppliers wanted to communicate and interact through electronic means, which Donnelly's system could not adequately support. The company needed an ERP system that could support higher levels of connectivity and excellence.

Miniature Precision Components, Inc. (MPC), a leading tier-one supplier for major automotive manufacturers, was facing challenges due to its outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The system had been heavily modified over the years to accommodate the company's specific requirements and add third-party functionality. However, these modifications hindered easy and cost-effective updates, leaving MPC's system about three years behind current technology, even as the company paid for regular system updates. The system was also restrictive and disjointed, making it difficult to reconcile and manage data. MPC needed a new ERP system that could support its mission of delivering top-tier quality to the major automotive manufacturers, provide real-time data, and integrate all segments of the business.

Double H Plastics, a manufacturer of high-quality plastic cores for the paper, film, and foil converting industry, was facing challenges due to its growth into the food packaging industry. The company was using a Unix/DOS-based system called Tiny Term, which lacked real-time data and system integration across its enterprise. This was causing inefficiencies and delays in their operations. The company realized it was time to modernize and thoroughly evaluated multiple ERP vendors before selecting IQMS for its familiarity with Double H Plastics’ industry and its comprehensive functionality that required no third-party applications.

Top Die Casting Company, a leading provider of aluminum die castings and plastic-injected moldings, was hindered by an outdated, home-grown enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The old system was slow, especially when multiple people were using it, and had evolved through several different in-house programmers and stages of company growth, resulting in the loss of critical information such as production history and employee data. The company needed a single-source, centralized ERP system that could provide real-time data accuracy to everyone in the company, from the shop floor to the top floor.

Nissen Chemitec America, a leading manufacturer serving automakers, was managing enterprise operations with an AS/400-based system, which was eventually replaced with an ERP software that promoted its design for automotive manufacturers. However, the latter system, while conforming to automotive customers’ stringent requirements, hindered Nissen Chemitec America’s ability to advance lean manufacturing principles. The company was looking for a more tailored ERP solution— one built specifically for contract manufacturers serving the automotive industry. The previous system was cumbersome, required heavy data entry, and blocked the company's lean efforts due to the maintenance required. The company needed a fully automated system that not only adhered to the automotive compliance requirements like electronic data interchange (EDI), Labeling, and quality functions, but was also robust as well as scalable.

Plastic Components, Inc. (PCI) is a leading, globally-competitive supplier of critical molded plastic parts for a diverse range of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). However, the company was struggling with managing operations with several nonintegrated, manual databases, which was putting a heavy load on the company’s staffing resources. Data was scattered throughout the company, and there was no standard for reporting, so information was often unavailable or inaccurate. Without accurate data, PCI couldn’t easily provide value quotes to its customers, and because the system lacked inventory management controls, inventory could not be checked without calling a live person. The company was looking for a single database solution that offered centralized, accurate, and relevant data that was accessible to everyone in the company.

Jabil Packaging Solutions (JPS), a provider of precision molded plastic products, was facing dynamic changes in the healthcare and packaging markets. Technologies, regulations, patient and consumer behaviors, population demographics, and business models were all experiencing transformation, making the future of healthcare difficult to predict and navigate. In 2013, Nypro was acquired by Jabil to provide new long-term solutions for Jabil customers as well as to continue to serve Nypro’s diversified customer base. When JPS was acquired by Jabil, they moved to SAP, which was their core enterprise system; but they wanted to keep the real-time manufacturing enterprise system (MES) software they had been using. JPS Iowa had been using the complete IQMS solution for nearly two decades, but was adamant about keeping the MES piece after moving over to the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Dymotek, a leading custom molder in the United States, was facing challenges in managing its growing business. The company had been using a combination of systems since its inception, which no longer satisfied the needs of its ambitious growth goals. The company needed a system that could provide real-time information to their customers and adapt to changing demands in an increasingly challenging global marketplace. The company also needed a system that could provide an exact understanding of the costs of goods produced, including the cost of equipment usage involved in production. Furthermore, the company needed a system that could provide excellent customer service, such as providing daily updates on production to customers with tight inventory requirements.

DPS Skis, a company that designs and manufactures advanced skis, was experiencing rapid growth and found that their existing QuickBooks accounting software was not robust enough to support their expanding operations. The company's business model, characterized by high seasonality and the manufacture of an expensive product, left little room for error. As DPS grew and set up its own manufacturing facility in Salt Lake City, it became apparent that QuickBooks was not up to the task, particularly in managing inventory and order entry. The company also faced challenges when it began working with an app called Sellpad, which was eventually pulled from the market, leaving DPS without tech support and a need for a new system.

Load Trail, LLC, a leading provider of high-quality trailers, was facing challenges with its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, Epicor’s Vantage solution. The software was unreliable and had limited scheduling capabilities, which was affecting on-time material planning and processing. This was leading to decreased cost savings and was negatively impacting customer relationships. The software lacked the necessary functionality to maintain excellent customer service, operational efficiency, and competitiveness in the market. As a result, Load Trail began to seek a more comprehensive software solution to manage future growth and better serve its customers.

Comar, a manufacturer of plastic packaging products and components for the medical, pharmaceutical, healthcare, personal and home care, food and beverage, and niche markets, needed a system that would provide real-time product and processing insights and the traceability to efficiently complete audits. The company serves highly regulated industries and competes on both quality and agility. The challenge was to deliver products that meet both customers’ deadlines and quality requirements, including compliance with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and International Standards Organization (ISO) standards. The company also needed to handle short-notice production runs when their customers need them and consolidate financial reports across all nine Comar manufacturing plants for greater financial visibility and control.

PAC Strapping Products’ plans for expanding the business were being held back by manual approaches to managing inventory, billing, pricing, orders, and other processes. These manual processes led to errors, delayed customer payments, and days to weeks of extra work for employees. As the management team began mapping out a strategy for expanding the business across both traditional customers and new markets, they realized that they would need to automate their operations to keep pace. An evaluation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems led the company to select the DELMIAWorks manufacturing ERP system.

SEA-LECT Plastics Corporation, a leading supplier of injection molding manufacturing, design, product development and tooling services, was facing the challenge of automating all facets of injection-molding production. This included estimating, quoting, sales, order processing, planning, scheduling, tooling, design for manufacturing, production, inventory, procurement, and delivery. The company aimed to increase efficiency and improve quality, as well as to better understand actual costs per job to maintain profit margins while improving the company’s competitive position. The company initially relied on Sea-Dog’s custom-developed enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and Excel spreadsheets to manage its injection-molding operations. However, the manufacturing services provider needed to find innovative solutions to streamline and improve all functions related to injection molding production to support growth.