PLM investment grows

Even in the face of a severe economic downturn, product life cycle management (PLM) investments continued to grow in 2008, says Manufacturing Business Technology.

According to CIMdata statistics, the overall PLM market experienced growth in 2008 that surprisingly fell only slightly short of earlier expectations - primarily because of a robust start for PLM investments in the first half of the year.

Only in the last quarter did the market slow appreciably, which will undoubtedly continue in 2009 until the economy turns around significantly. Nevertheless, a wide range of companies are investing in PLM, recognising that implementing the approach may be one of the major deciding factors in determining which organisations are best able to weather the current economic storm.

Rootstock Software, the manufacturing software arm of Danville Group, has released the beta version of their MRP software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution integrated with Netsuite, reports TMCnet.

Rootstock is a partner of pure-play SaaS ERP vendor, NetSuite, and its software fully integrates with the Netsuite ERP modules including the sales, purchasing and financial suite of NS.

The Netsuite and Rootstock premier partnership was reportedly formed in order to offer the feature-rich, scalable SaaS solution to the small and medium enterprise manufacturer.

Vantage is a fully integrated solution from first customer contact to quoting, scheduling, production, order fulfilment and accounting, according to Ferret.

The company says Vantage ERP manufacturing software delivers standard, pre-packaged best practises functionality in sales management, customer relationship management, financials, supply chain management, production management, planning and scheduling, product data management and customer service management.

It adds that the software is one of the first ERP solutions delivered with .NET, service-oriented architecture and smart client based on Microsoft .NET and Web services.