At SuiteWorld 2013, CEO Zach Nelson said NetSuite is getting serious about building out their capabilities for manufacturers. Today, manufacturers with significant MES requirements have the option to use IQity Solutions integrated with NetSuite. IQity is one of only a handful of vendors that have achieved Built for NetSuite certification, which means they have gone through NetSuite’s rigorous verification process and meet all of the integration and capability requirements.
I met with IQity’s CEO, David Gustovich, at SuiteWorld for a wide-ranging discussion. Their offering includes IQ-Fusion — their multi-tenant (i.e. real SaaS) solution for advanced manufacturing, IQ-Edge professional services for implementation and integration, and IQ-InSight, where they have dedicated business analysts remotely monitoring your operations to spot trends, identify improvement opportunities, and provide early warning when systems are at risk.
IQity provides finite capacity scheduling (sometimes referred to as APS-advanced planning and scheduling) with constraints by available resources, capacity, and utilization targets, as well as advanced MES, quality and compliance, all tightly integrated together on the NetSuite platform. They have some great tools and visualization techniques for managing variation or deviation at the point of execution, immediately alerting the operator or supervisor when something is out of tolerance. Their ‘Financial Opportunity Value Gap’ ($OVG) analyzes, in real-time, the financial opportunity of what the manufacturers processes are capable of vs. what they are actually achieving. While their software runs in the cloud, it interfaces directly to the SCADA, PLC, DCS,1 handheld devices, and bar code scanners on the factory floor via their IQ-Connector appliance located in the factory. This allows the plant to keep running if the network goes down.
IQity supports discrete, continuous/process, repetitive, and batch modes of manufacturing. Their pluggable architecture shortens integration time and allows functionality to be activated on demand. Their data model looks very extendable to support just about any attribute or unit of measure or other dimension of data as needed. Files, such as CAD drawings, HAACP plans, Material Safety Data Sheets, or any other document can be attached at any place in the system.
I was pretty impressed by how far they’ve come, especially considering that IQity only started building the product in 2009. That has given them the advantage of building on the latest technologies and platforms. IQity is a young company with a lot of potential. Expect to hear more about them as they grow.
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1. SCADA = Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, PLC = Programmable Logic Controller, DCS = Distributed Control System.
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