The customer, a major mobile communications vendor, was faced with the challenge of designing, developing, and manufacturing a high volume of 5G-ready remote radio units (RRUs) for their customers. These RRUs needed to cover a variety of frequency bands and power levels. The emergence of 5G has led to an increase in demand for a wider variety of RRUs with different frequency and power level requirements. The customer needed a partner with strong design, new product development, test engineering, and global manufacturing capabilities as well as scale.

The cloud industry is experiencing significant growth, and keeping pace with infrastructure build-out demands is a major challenge. A leading cloud service provider was in need of a partner to design and manufacture high-quality motherboards on a massive scale. The size of the project left no room for error. Even the smallest errors could result in delayed deployment and increased total cost of ownership (TCO). The customer needed an attentive partner they could trust with their design-led manufacturing. They also needed to navigate unplanned obstacles such as sourcing issues and the impact of tariffs, and hit their cost and schedule targets.

J. Kings, a broad line food service distributor, was previously utilizing Microsoft® Excel for scheduling and accounting needs. As they continued to grow, they required a system that would facilitate all process manufacturing and business operations functions in a unified system to stay competitive in their growing industry. They needed a system that would provide them both visibility of their inventory and production along with traceability of lot numbers. They also needed to control the quality of its products beginning with incoming raw materials, through ingredient manufacturing, all the way to final packaging.

Hampford Research, Inc. (HRI) was previously operating on a homegrown system that was difficult to maintain and didn’t allow for any upgrades. With a lack of real-time data and complete visibility to all manufacturing operations, they weren’t able to judge on a daily basis what was happening within the company – everything from inventory status to warehouse management to simple financial reporting – there was always an information delay.

IRMCO, a manufacturer of water-based, environmentally friendly lubricant technologies for the metal-forming industry, was previously utilizing a discrete manufacturing ERP system. The system was not a proper fit for their process manufacturing business and it wasn’t going to be supported in the future. This compelled IRMCO to research a new ERP solution. The company needed a system that could easily and efficiently track its inventory levels in a real-time environment. They also wanted to streamline their processes, reduce operational costs, and eliminate dual recording of a majority of their inventory transactions.

Pacific Nutritional, Inc. (PNI) was in need of a fully integrated ERP system that was specifically designed for their highly regulated industry. They were operating on a manufacturing system that wasn’t connected to the accounting system they utilized. Another search criterion was a strong, committed, client service team to support the software. Finally, PNI wanted to upgrade from DOS operating system to a Windows system. PNI was experiencing an essential need for a software system that would be able to meet their long-term needs and grow with them in their changing industry.

21st Century HealthCare, Inc. was in search of an ERP solution that was industry-specific, cutting-edge, and capable of offering product modifications to meet their needs. They also required a software company that had a quality support team. The pharmaceutical industry was experiencing increased regulatory requirements of current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) documentation, and 21st Century needed an ERP solution that would provide sound reporting standards. They also desired more inventory control to increase the productivity of the manufacturing process.

Don’s Salads’ previous disparate systems, MAS 90, Parity and ProcessLogic, were a hindrance to their day-to-day operations. The legacy system was heavily customized and the customer support received was minimal at best. Daily operations were visibly slow and lacked integration between departments. Don’s Salads’ staff often spent 45 minutes placing a single customer sales order which involved creating a mock sales order in a separate system to complete the order for manufacturing, and then reworking the mock order to ensure accurate accounting. Don’s desired a unified solution that integrated their accounting and manufacturing functions as their future growth depended on it. “The critical needs that we had were lot traceability, accounting and being able to schedule our production in a streamlined fashion,” said Michele Lyter, Office and HR Manager, Don’s Salads. In their search for an ERP provider, they wanted a true business partner with reliable customer support and a solution that would take their entire manufacturing processes to the next level.

L.D. Davis was previously functioning on disparate systems, a combination of SAGE CRM, homegrown software and paper and pencil documentation/ tracking. Specifically, production scheduling was handwritten which was time consuming and prone to errors. As a made-to-order manufacturer, they needed the ability to track product formulation to provide quality metrics and traceability for their customers. The company’s unique ability to bid on distressed materials required a system that compares use of these materials with the purchase of regular raw materials. Lack of visibility by stakeholders throughout the company prohibited a clear picture of processes, inventory and customer orders.

Hammond Group, a chemical company with plants in the US and abroad, was facing growing overhead costs and lengthy implementation time with a tier one ERP supplier. They had also experienced two unsuccessful CRM system migrations. The company realized that to grow and maintain its reputation for customer care, it needed to invest in systems that would cut operational costs while still focusing on its customers. They turned to Aptean Process Manufacturing ERP Ross Edition to handle their financial and production operations.

Boston Centerless, a leader in supplying precision ground bar materials and grinding services, was facing several challenges with its existing software. The software was technologically outdated and lacked the analytical features required in the modern manufacturing environment. Furthermore, the support for the software was minimal. The company also had to manually prepare complex specification documents, which was a labor-intensive process. The lead time for processing orders was another challenge that the company was facing.

Primarch Manufacturing Inc. was a long-time user of Sage PFW, an older Sage solution. When Sage retired PFW and stopped offering support, Primarch determined the need to upgrade their ERP solution. The company needed a solution that would fit their manufacturing processes and be easy for their staff to learn and use. They also wanted a solution that would support their quarantine and test methodology, which is a core standard in their competitive private label manufacturing for nutraceuticals. This process involves quarantining everything upon receipt, applying lot numbers, and performing QC tests to verify vendor raw material claims.

Custom Ingredients, Inc. is a privately held company that supplies the Southern California food and nutraceuticals market with high quality flavors. The company's primary goals are dependable service, trustworthy relationships and up-to-date regulatory standards. However, when the company first started blending flavors, they relied on tools such as Excel to record formulations and inventory, with inventory tracking done manually. This was not efficient and did not allow for optimal inventory control and lot traceability. The company needed a formula-based manufacturing solution that could handle these tasks and more.

Keihin Corporation, a principal manufacturer for Honda, was facing a business problem where their three North American facilities needed a single solution to replace their existing, individually procured applications. This was necessary to support the increasing fluidity of customer schedules. The company was operating in an intensely competitive industry and needed to have quick and accurate information. Their customer schedules were very fluid and they were becoming more so by the week, month, and year as the car makers continued to respond to increasing consumer demands. In 1995, one of Keihin’s pre-merger companies, Indiana Precision Technology (KIPT), realized they were wasting time and duplicating effort by using standalone PCs running a variety of individually procured applications. The rapid growth and associated disjointed applications, combined with more stringent and fluid customer schedules, made an imperative case to change business processes and implement an ERP system with the goal to streamline operations, increase operational responsiveness, and meet customers’ growing demands as effectively as possible.

DEK Printing Machines Ltd, a member of the Dover Technologies group of companies, provides state-of-the-art precision screen printing systems and pre-placement process solutions to the electronic assembly market. The company needed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that would easily fit around its manufacturing operation. DEK also wanted a solution that has a fast implementation timescale and to resolve critical millennium compliance issues the company was facing with its legacy systems. The company found that having installed a complete internal card-driven Kanban just-in-time (JIT) system it needed an ERP solution that would easily fit around its manufacturing operation.

XL Machine, a high-volume manufacturing shop serving several industries, was facing issues with inventory management. The company was producing costly, high-end parts, making inventory critical for eliminating waste and maintaining profitability. However, there was no consistent method of tracking inventory, either for raw materials or finished parts. This lack of inventory tracking could potentially lead to a loss of about a million dollars a month in product. Additionally, XL Machine management wanted to implement a system that could track all of their capital, including human and financial. They were looking for a system that could integrate complete scheduling, costing (for both materials and labor), and finance.

San Diego Precision Machining (SDPM) was experiencing rapid growth and found that its legacy ERP system could not keep up. The company's owner, Jason Matteson, had plans for further expansion but realized that their existing ERP system wouldn't support this growth. The existing vendor's focus was on traditional MRP rather than ERP for job shops, and despite releasing several new versions, there was no new functionality. Furthermore, the support offered by the vendor was poor. Matteson knew he had to look for a new solution or abandon his growth plans. Despite the previous vendor's efforts to accommodate their needs, SDPM found JobBOSS was a premier solution that could continue to evolve with them.

Serapid, a manufacturer of products and systems for the precision movement of heavy loads, was previously using spreadsheets to create a Bill of Materials (BOM) based on the CAD model of parts it was making. Each job would get its own sheet, and then the data would be integrated into a larger master file used for purchasing supplies. This manual method took a long time to complete because various amounts of information had to be inputted, and company engineers had to “translate” to purchasing managers what exactly they wanted. Even small jobs with 20 or less components took an hour to fill out because of the number of steps and manual entry involved. Larger jobs tended to be too much of a hassle to enter the full BOM.

Forrest Machining Inc., a woman-owned aerospace machining and assembly shop, had to adapt to a significant shift in its customer base. Previously, the company's business was made up of approximately 40 percent of government accounts. However, this has now increased to nearly 90 percent. This shift necessitated a higher level of precision and compliance with government standards and requirements. The company needed to improve the accuracy of Shop Floor Labor Data, achieve real-time Job Costing information, streamline Payroll and labor reconciliation, and determine Direct and Indirect labor dollars. All these were critical to pass government policies that scrutinize job processes and costs.

Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) is a highly successful professional stock car racing team that builds everything in-house to keep their designs proprietary and continue winning races. However, as the team grew from one engineer and 15 total employees in 1991 to 560 employees operating 30 CNC machines in a 400,000 square-foot race shop, they faced challenges in managing inventory and scheduling. They needed a software solution to guide them on inventory and scheduling as they were previously tracking production on spreadsheets and manually shuffling folders to manage their schedule and inventory. The team also needed to accommodate emergency jobs, stop running out of parts, and generate orders automatically based on their production schedule.

Richard Childress Racing (RCR) faced the challenge of managing their manufacturing process efficiently to meet tight deadlines and adapt to product changes. Initially, they used JobBOSS for scheduling their machines to quickly finish parts and prototypes for testing before race day. However, as the complexity of their operations increased, they needed to schedule programming as well. They were also struggling with communication issues, especially regarding materials needed for building a racecar. The team had to complete a working chassis in less than a week, which required efficient and transparent information relay. The short turnaround time and the delay in getting material requirements to the materials planner were other challenges they faced.

Tom-Cin Metals, a custom fabrications company, was facing major problems with overscheduling, inefficient data entry processes, and inaccurate order handling. The company's old way of doing things was very manual, with employees scanning, picking material, and logging material by hand. This was very labor-intensive. As for data collection and inventory, there was a tendency to think that the material was ordered, only to find out later that the order wasn’t placed. This resulted in waiting for the material to come in. Another common challenge was the inability for customer service or the production manager to efficiently manage order entry or respond to an order status call from trading partners and customers. These tasks could easily consume hours and even days of lost productivity.

DeNovo, an independent upstream operating company based in Trinidad and Tobago, was seeking to leverage the best technology commercially available to run optimized operations that support innovation, enhanced workflows, and industrial efficiency. The company manages complex operations with a wide range of risk profiles and needed to be agile and highly efficient to remain safe, competitive, and profitable. Operating inefficiencies could account for as much as 25% loss in production output and up to a 40% increase in energy and operational costs.

One of the world’s largest fully integrated zinc and lead smelting and refining complexes wanted to improve their metallurgical operations. The team recognized they had an opportunity to improve preventative maintenance by using information from their process signal historian. In addition, they wanted a solution that could help as the company developed a comprehensive approach to strengthen environmental, employee and community safeguards. The operations group’s reliability team needed a technology to track, detect and prevent equipment failures.

Linde’s U.S. engineering organization was facing high estimating variances and overruns, coupled with a large, dispersed estimating team. The problem was diagnosed as an inconsistent use of tools and business processes in the estimating function. The company was looking for a more strategic, centralized solution to streamline its estimating discipline, improve the accuracy of capital cost estimates, and achieve long-term cost savings.

Phillips66, a leading integrated oil producer, invests millions of dollars a year in refining capital projects, which can include maintenance, clean fuels upgrades, and growth investments. Completing these projects in a timely, efficient manner will help the company meet its operational goals and significantly improve the bottom line. However, with market dynamics keeping refinery loads at over 90% capacity and regulatory pressures requiring clean fuels and emissions upgrades, Phillips66 faces a steady growth of downstream capital investment projects. The company adheres to three principles for each project: capital discipline, operational excellence and execution, and financial optimization. That’s why the estimating function—now managed through Aspen Capital Cost Estimator—is so critical in examining the volume of capital proposals, and providing estimates earlier in the process.

The company initiated a production planning and scheduling project as part of a major initiative focused on process re-engineering and automation. The overall goal of the production planning and scheduling project was to support several business initiatives. These included replacing the manual scheduling process, improving customer service, optimizing raw material and finished products inventories, reducing costs associated with off-specification quality, campaign transitions, packaging, and logistics and distribution, sharing information and improving cooperation between marketing/sales and production planning functions, and integrating planning and scheduling with the ERP system.

A large producer of synthetic rubber had been having quality issues with its batch products. These quality issues were resulting in significant revenue loss, as the company often needed to either reprocess the material or sell it for a lower price than expected. The producer was unable to determine what was causing the batches to be out of spec. The company was investigating issues with a reactor process that brings together ingredients to manufacture synthetic rubber. There were multiple reactors that performed this process, but the Aspen ProMV project would focus on the production of one reactor.

Saras, the owner of the most complex refinery in the Mediterranean, was looking for ways to improve reliability in their capital- and asset-intensive refinery operations. They had a strategic objective to improve uptime and decrease maintenance costs. The challenge was to ensure reliable operation of a 300,000 BPD refinery and a 575-megawatt integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power generation plant. The initial project focused on four pieces of equipment: a feed pump, a wash oil pump, a makeup H2 compressor, and a recycle compressor. The desired outcomes of the pilot project were an accurate solution that detects precise patterns of normal behavior, failures, and anomalies, a solution that indicates early warning, with significant lead time from point of detection to actual failure, and the ability to capture a failure signature and use it to detect failures in unseen data on the same assets and/or similar assets.

AspenTech, a company with a 36-year history in process engineering simulation, advanced process control, process optimization, and supply chain activities, has decided to venture into the asset performance space. The decision was driven by feedback from customers who, despite praising AspenTech's process optimization tools, expressed that poor asset performance was hampering their overall business performance. They found that they could not optimize the process and improve profit margins when assets failed to live up to expectations and intended reliability. This sparked AspenTech's new direction towards optimizing overall asset performance in industrial process plants.