Extended Solutions

Fourth Shift offers integrated solutions to enhance standard functionality that helps companies derive additional value from ERP investments and achieve productivity gains.

Lean: 100% Demand-Driven Automation

Lean accommodates the flow of lean manufacturing processes simply and at the rate of customer demand to drive continuous improvements while eliminating waste and inefficiencies. At the core of Lean is the Dynamic Lean Engine. It automates the lean process, generating signals at the right times throughout the enterprise to quickly respond to customer demand and boost performance to the next level. Lean maximizes and advances the benefits of lean for manufacturers to increase productivity, optimize capacity and improve responsiveness to change.

VisiBar: Barcoding and Workflow

It’s easy to underestimate the power of good workflows and the impact they have on a business. VisiBar is our most popular extended application for this reason. It’s an intelligent barcoding and workflow tool enabling data collection, workflow flexibility and serial-device control to create business-specific solutions.

VisiWatch: Event Monitoring and Alerts

VisiWatch performs everyday monitoring tasks so companies don’t have to, alerting the appropriate people when exceptions occur. Each company sets the rules and the actions, then VisiWatch delivers the right information at the right time as defined. VisiWatch can monitor tasks and be personalized to specific business needs for users working in finance, manufacturing, IT, sales and marketing.

Software Development Kit

The Fourth Shift Software Development Kit (SDK) allows companies to create powerful personalizations. It also enables the building of new business management extensions and offers solutions and services tailored to each company’s distinct business needs.

Business Process Management

The smooth functioning of any business relies in part on the processes that manage daily operations. Strict adherence is critical to maintaining and improving business. Fourth Shift Business Process Management (BPM) automates and manages processes so companies can turn them into dependable, repeatable business assets.

BPM makes the horizontal integration of all a company’s business systems possible, giving manufacturers the power to manage an entire process, not just functional fragments. It removes the walls that separate functional transactions, making the processes behind them visible through BPM’s electronic workflow diagrams. These diagrams provide step-by-step workflow views, making evaluation easy and revision as simple as dragging and dropping icons embedded with existing business rules.

Using this model, process changes made within BPM are immediately reflected in the operation of a company’s business systems. The benefits of BPM are numerous, including:

• Enables companies to streamline and optimize unique cross functional processes
• Important for companies seeking to achieve or maintain certifications such as ISO
• Enables companies to document compliance with internal and external regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley
• Acts as a platform to launch continuous process improvement initiatives
• Integrates business applications for more efficient review and revision of the processes manufacturers use to run each business