Long Beach, CA — May 23, 2003 — The advanced technology systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin this week announced it has selected Apriso Corp.'s software to track the time and attendance of employees at four of its manufacturing locations, thus satisfying the Department of Defense (DOD) and customer requirements for traceability, particularly for progress billing.
"The world as we have known it for the last few decades has changed," said Adam Bartkowski, president and CEO of Apriso. "While major defense contractors used to be able to provide general reports on project status, today they must supply a much greater level of accurate and detailed information, almost in real-time, to contractually satisfy partners, customers and regulatory bodies. This data is critical for defense and security related projects, but is a common scenario for almost every manufacturing company today."
Apriso's suite of process driven and workflow management applications are designed to integrate with existing processes, people, programs, machines and material to provide real-time, event-driven synchronization, control and reporting of these processes to any authorized community of interest in the enterprise.
In Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control's case, the company needed to track labor statistics in plants in Texas and Arkansas, and then feed the resulting data into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, for generation of reports for DOD compliance and invoicing. The multi-plant installation was completed and up and running in less than 90 days, according to the provider.
"We have created a bottom-out software model that brings information technology to the value chain rather than the 'top' of the corporation, where most enterprise software has gone essentially since its invention," explained Bartkowski.
According to Bartkowski, the "bottom-out" enterprise software is so named because it focuses on providing real-time, global observation, synchronization and control of the "bottom-level" processes of an enterprise, where materials are actually transformed into products by people and machines.
Unlike top-down enterprise software applications that use high-level plans and forecasts to drive "calls to action" down into an enterprise, he said, the bottom-out model is focused on an event-driven enterprise where actions in real time — throughout the entire manufacturing and supply network — continually beget other actions.
He noted that this is the model required to implement such business operations as lean manufacturing, "lots of one," the "real-time enterprise," demand pull, kaizen (successive improvement) or product genealogy.
"Our goal is to enable any enterprise to 'institutionalize' its strategic business objectives and best practices, such as lean supply, six-sigma quality or regulatory compliance, and to systematically build out a foundation for a competitive, lean real-time enterprise," said Bartkowski.
