IQMS

The food and beverage industry, as one of the most regulated spaces to ensure consumer health and safety, is operating in challenging times. Despite growing at a blistering pace, F&B companies have long struggled to comply with stringent safety regulations while being swamped with concerns about ingredient traceability, shelf-life tracking, and more. Organizations such as the FDA, EPA, OSHA, and FTC are diligently enforcing reforms pertaining to the launch of healthy products, food labeling, hygiene requirements, and similar necessities. These continuously changing reforms on food quality, waste disposal, raw material, and other F&B related elements are leaving F&B manufacturers in a haze. They also have to factor in consumers’ rising inclination toward maintaining robust health, which has made ingredient labeling an integral part of the packaging process. Furthermore, because of the limited shelf-life of raw materials and perishables, manufacturers are now required to improve their inventory management to avoid the occurrence of food-borne pathogens. To ensure factories are performing to the established standards and maintain consistent product management, F&B companies need better, more visible data. While enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems house some of the data, they lack the functionality to deliver information promptly to the shop floor.

This where IQMS’ manufacturing execution system (MES) makes the difference, offering F&B manufacturers the technology necessary to succeed and flourish, whether they specialize in produce, beverages, frozen entrees, or canned goods. When it comes to compliance and food safety, IQMS helps F&B manufacturers overcome all hurdles with its two-way internet of things (IoT) traceability, expiration, spoilage and shelf-life tracking using first-expire, first-out (FEFO) logic, and robust labeling options.

A Streamlined Approach

IQMS integrates MES and ERP functionality into a comprehensive solution in which all data—from systems and IoT sensors on the shop floor to the back office—is managed by the same embedded Oracle database. This enables manufacturing enterprises to take a streamlined approach to centralizing activity across the supply chain and ensuring that complete, accurate information is available to all authorized users at all times. Additionally, IQMS’ rich, cloud-based business intelligence and visualization functionality helps manufacturers gain greater insights into their data.

With IQMS’ industry-specific ERP and MES solution, every single aspect of a business, from human resources and financial management to warehouse control and quality assurance, are completely connected.

A blend of industry-specific F&B features with a dash of advanced mobile and shop floor technology is IQMS’ recipe for success for businesses. IQMS’ solutions streamline processes across discrete, repetitive, and batch process manufacturing environments, whether build-to-order or build-to-stock supply chain models. They also offer accurate and transparent inventory control, including batch, IoT, and serial number traceability to optimize returns and track expiration or best-by dates. Other features include private labeling functionality and robust scheduling engine to handle volume scheduling, advanced sequencing, wait times, and other complex scheduling requirements.

Through IQMS’s ‘Choice is the New Cloud program,’ customers have access to three deployment models designed for the varied needs of manufacturers. These include options to have a cloud-based subscription, their own IQMS license running in a hosted cloud, or licensed IQMS software running in their own data centers—either on servers or in a private cloud.

Panacea for All Problems

When one customer, Eldon James, a manufacturer of standard and custom hose fittings, came across some roadblocks to greater revenue growth, IQMS’ integrated ERP software and MES system definitely paid off, enabling them to enter and excel at winning new business in new markets. Eldon James was finding itself constrained by the lack of system integration across the company. Disconnected, multiple systems had become a bottleneck on every aspect of manufacturing and supplier operations, making it progressively more difficult to provide the responsiveness the company prides itself on. Most importantly, it was starting to slow down the company’s ability to grow as fast as it was capable of. Knowing that the siloed systems had to go, Eldon James began the search for an MES that could scale across its entire business. As they realized what they needed was an ERP system designed specifically for the plastics industry, they found IQMS to be the panacea for all their problems. The IQMS ERP system gave them an entirely new level of visibility and control over every aspect of quality. With IQMS in place, today, their new product development strategies came to fruition with Eldon James now offering over 6,000 products to their customers located in 40 different countries. By having a single system that organized all the data they needed for production scheduling, quality assurance, and shipping, Eldon James was able to increase their on-time delivery accuracy by nearly 100 percent, jumping from 50 percent to 98 percent in less than a year.

Convergence of Technologies

As a leading manufacturer of ERP software, IQMS has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE company that provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations. Dassault Systèmes’ world leading solutions transform the way products are designed, produced, and supported. Their collaborative solutions foster social innovation, expanding possibilities for the virtual world to improve the real world.

With California-based IQMS becoming a part of the company, Dassault Systèmes was able to extend the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to small and midsized manufacturing companies seeking to digitally transform their business operations.

IQMS’ software that includes on-premise EnterpriseIQ and software as a service WebIQ, deliver an all-in-one solution to mid-market manufacturers for managing engineering, manufacturing and business ecosystems by digitally connecting order processing, scheduling, production, and shipping processes in real time. Integrating IQMS’s solutions with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud allowed Dassault Systèmes to provide these manufacturers with an affordable system for operations that improves the collaboration, manufacturing efficiency, and business agility needed to serve their customers successfully. The manufacturers, many of whom were SOLIDWORKS users, also gained the flexibility to rapidly scale up as a business grows. SOLIDWORKS is Dassault Systèmes’ proprietary solid modelling software with its integrated analytical tools and design automation that help stimulate physical behavior such as kinematics, dynamics, stress, deflection, vibration, temperatures or fluid flow to suit all types of design. In parallel, these manufacturers can engage in new business opportunities and create value by supplying their manufacturing know-how and services to a large community of designers and engineers in Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace – the world’s largest virtual factory.

Today’s manufacturing ERP mid-market is estimated at $5 billion, with a seven to eight percent annual growth rate through 2023. In the context of the industry renaissance, the world’s 250,000 small and midsized manufacturers must adopt and optimize new ways of producing and doing business through digital transformation in order to innovate and accelerate their growth in an increasingly competitive, global marketplace.

“For years, our business has been committed to maximizing our manufacturing customers’ success by delivering a comprehensive manufacturing ERP system built specifically for the mid-market manufacturers and backed by extensive support and educational services, which has earned us recognition in a number of industry reports and numerous business awards ,” says Gary Nemmers, President and CEO, IQMS, Dassault Systèmes. “As part of Dassault Systèmes, we can take the next steps in providing customers with new approaches to achieving operational efficiency and effectiveness and doing so with a global reach.”

Dassault Systèmes’ acquisition of IQMS is aimed toward helping IQMS expand its customer base by leveraging the presence in the mid-market space achieved with Dassault Systèmes’ SOLIDWORKS applications, which are delivered and supported by the company’s Professional Solutions global partner channel. IQMS’s solutions are used by 1,000 customers based primarily in the U.S. whose 2,000 manufacturing facilities in 20 countries produce for the automotive, industrial equipment, medical device, consumer goods, and consumer packaged goods industries. Customers include Westfall Technik, KKSP Precision Machining, AMA Plastics, Donnelly Custom Manufacturing, and Ventura Manufacturing Inc., to name a few.

“For three decades, we have been committed to delivering a comprehensive system built specifically to give our manufacturing customers the unified view across their operations and supply chain that they need to compete in the global market,” concludes Nemmers.