The Company History
Made2Manage (M2M) founder Jerry Rock came from a manufacturing environment and knew from his own struggles that other manufacturers needed help managing their manufacturing businesses and operations. The company launched its first system on the DOS platform in 1986, and rewrote the application in 1995 for the Windows NT platform. Made2Manage went through a strong growth period from 1996 to 2000, during which time their revenue grew to more than $30 million (USD) per year. Though the company went public in 1997, a Boston venture capital firm, Battery Ventures, acquired it in 2003 and returned it to its status as a private company. Today, based in Indianapolis, Indiana (US), Made2Manage still serves the small to medium-sized manufacturing market, though its solutions encompass a greater proportion of manufacturers' business requirements.
Business Background
However, Made2Manage approaches building new functionality with caution. The company seeks to emphasize core customer requirements over feature bloat. According to the company's manager of Product Marketing and Communications, Maureen Sanner, Made2Manage is "developing more robust high-quality functional products with features and optional modules that customers actually want and know they will use as opposed to just a very broad set but not very deep set of functionality".
A focussed set of functionality is particularly important as many of Made2Manage's customers have never had an integrated enterprise system before. This means that they've been struggling to get good data from disparate existing systems. They may have used home-grown or patched-together systems, or else they may have simply managed their production capabilities using spreadsheets or a manual production board. Because of these non-integrated methods of managing manufacturing business processes, the front-office and sales teams didn't know what they could promise and deliver or what their production people could do. In addition, the finance department didn't have access to the orders or production timing, and so did not know when a job was closed and could get out the door.
Several of Made2Manage's success stories sprang from just such situations. The first involves Zentech Manufacturing Inc., which produces printed circuit boards. Zentech started off using an entry-level financial accounting system. Thus, while it used to manage scheduling and job costing with spreadsheets, by using the Made2Manage solution, it is now able to integrate these processes with everything from the generation of quotes to the production of financial statements.
Both Zentech and Abbatron are examples of companies that bought the Enterprise Business System in order to reduce numerous points of data entry to one or two points, and thus gain visibility into their operations. The Enterprise Business System helps them make inventory turns so that they don't have to carry as much inventory at one time, keep their in-production costs down, enforce promised delivery dates to their customers, and get full orders out to their customers in a more responsive manner.
Other plans for the future include continuing to develop or acquire vertical product strengths. In the past, Made2Manage's acquisition of DTR Software International helped the company focus on the plastics processing manufacturing industry. The recent acquisition of Cimnet Systems, which develops software and services specific to the printed circuit board industry, helped Made2Manage expand its reach into China, where it sees a growing trend in manufacturing printed circuit boards. Ultimately, Made2Manage will provide an expanded set of in-depth solutions for specific industries within the manufacturing sector.
The contribution analysis graph below demonstrates the degree to which each area of Made2Manage Enterprise Business System contributes functionality to the overall solution. This graph is based on Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. (TEC)'s model of ERP solutions.