Solutions

"By having a tool that provides direct access to inventory costing and valuation we are able to close our books in a fraction of the previous time."

Steve Harrell, CFO and VP of Operations, Akustica

The Serus Platform

The Platform for IOM

Serus IOM Platform allows you to readily access all manufacturing information, analyze process status, make informed decisions in context, and collaborate across the ecosystem.

The platform has the following capabilities:

  • Access: Serus offers the only end-to-end, integrated solution that provides real-time information access and a full view of the entire manufacturing ecosystem, with the ability to give all personnel access only to the data they need. By using the platform to handle content management and distribution, you can greatly reduce your design to profitability timeframe.
  • Analyze: Serus provides unique algorithms to normalize, uncover and understand bottlenecks in your global distributed operations. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are defined, monitored and leveraged to optimize factory efficiencies. Global corporate and supply chain-wide information is integrated, rolled-up and analyzed for all worldwide operations through powerful visualization and reporting technologies.
  • Decide: Serus provides decision-support capabilities to proactively highlight operational challenges through real-time rules, facilitate decision making, and execute corrective action through integrated communications with your corporate and supply-chain enterprise systems.
  • Deploy: Serus provides an integrated, standards-based platform that integrates with, and complements, your existing infrastructure and systems, providing investment protection. The solution is easy to customize and extend, adapting to the way you work.

The key functions include:

  • Management of collaborative, transactional, business content
    • Raw data stores/caches/catalogs of products, orders, locations, costs, flows, etc.
    • Meta-data (information about the fields and structure of the data stores)
    • Collaborative posting of changes to managed content
    • Change tracking
    • What-If’s (scenarios that consist of provisional changes)
    • Dynamic Custom Formulas and Analytics against content
  • Loosely coupled ecosystem
    • Service Oriented Architecture using Web Services or other protocols
  • Access Control / Security
    • Permission-based control for access to content based on
      • Role
      • User
  • Reporting/Presentation
    • Real-time fetch of content
    • Tabular
    • Graphical Presentations
  • Dashboard support
    • User driven content - enables users to quickly access information important to them 
    • Multiple Presentation Panels
    • Layout Control
    • Filtering Control
    • Management of Dashboard Configuration Pages
  • Alerting
    • Real-time triggering of exceptions based on rules/expressions
    • Alert Management Pane – shows what alerts have occurred and helps user resolve the alert, by jumping to the correct module with context.
  • Workflow
    • Structure your business processes and enable collaboration across your ecosystem
      • Approval rules
      • Change management rules
  • Partner Access Portal
    • Consists of configuration of content, presentation, access rules, allowing partner organizations to carry out controlled interactions with Serus application and content
  • Administration (controlled through administrative UI)
    • Allows for definition of Users, Roles, Permissions
    • Allows for review and monitoring of configuration, metadata, operational statistics
    • Allows for defining business objects such as Products, Locations, Organizations, Activities, etc.
  • Customization
    • Profile, Views, Filters, Formulas, Dashboard Configuration
    • Alert Rules
    • Templates

Technology used or supported by Serus:

  • Java J2EE standards, including JSP, XML, and JDBC
  • Standard web browsers including Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox
  • Apache Jakarta Project libraries, including Xerces, Xalan, and Apache Commons libraries
  • All software is written in Java for portability across operating systems, including Windows, Unix, and Linux

Current and emerging content standards supported by Serus:

  • Web Services invocation standards (i.e., SOAP)
  • Industry-standard content (i.e., RosettaNet)
  • External and legacy data formats (i.e., Microsoft Excel)
  • Message formats (i.e., Java Message Service)