Apriso

Apriso Corporation is a software and services company headquartered in the Los Angeles area of Southern California. The firm's flagship product, "FlexNet", is a software platform for manufacturing operations execution. Apriso serves more than 170 customers in 41 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia. Its customers include General Motors, Lear Corporation, Honeywell, Microsoft, L'Oréal, Lockheed Martin, Becton Dickinson, Rubbermaid, Saint-Gobain, Novelis and Essilor.
Office locations
Apriso has offices throughout the world, including Long Beach, California (US HQ); Paris, France (EMEA HQ); Beijing, China; Tokyo, Japan (ASIA PAC HQ); São Paulo, Brazil; Milan, Italy; Cuautitlan Izcalli, Mexico; Kraków, Poland; and Singapore, Singapore SG.
Management team
*Jim Henderson, President and CEO
*Chris Brecher, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations
*Chris Will, Chief Technology Officer (co-founder)
*Tom Comstock, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management
*Carey Tokirio, Chief Financial Officer
Ownership
Apriso is a privately held company with venture-backed funding from Brentwood Venture Capital, CMEA Ventures[http://www.cmeaventures.com/portfolio/index.php#7], LogiSpring, SAP Ventures and Wall Street Technology Partners LP.
History
Apriso trace its roots back to the aerospace industry when company founders Sundaresh Ramayya, Jeffrey Kurschner, Carl Hunt and Chris Will originally worked as the team behind a manufacturing operations management pilot project at Teledyne Industries (aka Teledyne Microelectronics) in Marina del Rey, California in 1989. The project started as in-house shop floor advanced manufacturing integration and automation under a multi-million-dollar contract from the U.S. Navy occurring in the period known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or "Star Wars" defense era under President Ronald Reagan.
The project was implemented internally at Teledyne on behalf of the U.S. Navy became the world's first multi-tasking application of IBM's OS/2 operating system. Using IBM's AS/400 midrange computing platform, the application received orders from a legacy ERP system and directed the Teledyne production department on what to build, reporting and feeding information back into the ERP system for status reporting. This marked the first-ever roundtrip communication between midrange computers and the shop floor, integrating manufacturing execution systems and warehouse management system with an ERP application, which remains one of Apriso's core competencies to this day.
IBM threw its weight behind the project, recognizing it could be a marketable application, which it then leveraged as part of a launch into the PC automation era. Teledyne also supported productizing the application, and began to offer it commercially to additional customers around 1989.
Toward the end of the 1980s as military technology initiatives began to wane, Teledyne scaled back its operations, allowing the team to launch its own business. By 1991 the team achieved around $700,000 in revenue and 10 customers including a $2.5 million contract with Allied Signal (later sold to Honeywell). The company was formally founded in 1992 as Computer Integrated Manufacturing or CIM Vision International, with its product denoted as the Manager Series, including Factory Manager, Shipping Manager, Warehouse Manager, Materials Manager and Time Manager Modules. In the mid-1990s, CIM Vision International had expanded beyond its aerospace and defense roots, having signed with pharmaceutical industry giant Baxter International for a multi-site implementation, including a facility in Puerto Rico, which was newly emerging as a popular offshore manufacturing site. Other pharmaceutical and life sciences customers followed.
During this time of technology evolution, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integration was beginning to emerge and became the organization's strength throughout the rest of the 1990s. The company standardized interfaces for its software to be compatible with every ERP system on the market, including those provided by SAP and Oracle. The company had experienced successful organic growth, but by the end of the 1990s it became clear to the management team that there was a shifting trend toward manufacturing globalization. The company began to seek venture funding to be used for R&D, product development and its own global expansion. At $13.2 million, the company closed what was then the largest VC financing deal in Southern California, and made the official announcement at the SAP's Sapphire Conference in Los Angeles.
On January 1, 2001, CIM Vision International rebranded itself as Apriso Corporation, concurrent with the launch of its next-generation FlexNet platform, which provides real time visibility, collaboration and control of plant-level operations across a global enterprise, filling the gap between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and automation systems.
The name "Apriso" is derived from the Spanish word aprisa, which means "quickly" or "fast", signifying the company's ability to enable manufacturers to respond quickly to market changes and shifting demand by operating in real-time, to adapt production and supply chain processes efficiently, quickly and easily.
Current Apriso products
FlexNet Suite
The company's flagship product is called "FlexNet", which collectively provides an Operations Execution System (OES) to manage and execute manufacturing and supply chain operations.
The company provides a Warehouse Management System (WMS) Solution considered by ARC Advisory Group as an "innovative approach to warehouse management" by offering this service from a manufacturer's perspective, instead of the traditional distribution center approach.
Source article reference: http://www.arcweb.com/Domains/SCM/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=7ae600da%2D7f89%2D41bb%2D8e5d%2D9838766ca24a&ID=62
The firm's FlexNet product suite is considered to be part of the "Manufacturing 2.0 next generation of manufacturing software providers", according to AMR Research.
Source article reference: http://www.amrresearch.com/content/View.asp?pmillid=20535
Services Oriented Architecture
The company's FlexNet product is built on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), allowing functionality to participate in end-to-end business workflows involving not just FlexNet, but other external systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and shop-floor (supervisory) control and data acquisition (SCADA).
Business Process Management
FlexNet includes a Business Process Management, or BPM suite to enable plant-floor operations and information technology (IT) professionals the ability to quickly configure manufacturing processes with little or no customization, contributing to the company's ability to increase agility across manufacturing operations.
Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM)
FlexNet is the first Operations Execution System built on a Services Oriented Architecture with Business Process Management capabilities. Traditional Manufacturing Executions Systems have limited functionality, typically designed for a single location. Apriso FlexNet is a Manufacturing Operations Management solution that provides a single platform for all manufacturing operations across every location, which enables enterprise manufacturers to be highly adaptable to frequently changing market, industry and customer demands.

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