SoftBrands Manufacturing, a Minneapolis-based supplier of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply-chain management (SCM) software for medium-size enterprises, is moving key product software development and maintenance to India and China.
A facility set up in December last year in Tianjin in China to do maintenance of Fourth Shift version 7.2, SoftBrands’ integrated manufacturing solution, will now develop the next version of the product, according to Randy Tofteland, president of SoftBrands Manufacturing Group, a business group within the company. Likewise a development centre in Bangalore will be working on DemandStream, a supply chain execution system that enables demand-pull scheduling and material flow throughout the enterprise supply chain.
“We prototyped DemandStream for lean manufacturing environments last year and tested it at 12 sites in the US,” said Tofteland. “We now plan to productize the software at our Bangalore centre.” Another centre at Noida near Delhi does the maintenance of SoftBrands’ Evolution, an ERP and business-to-business (B2B) system.
SoftBrands Manufacturing is also placing its bets on India and China as its key markets in Asia. Apart from an office in Singapore, SoftBrands Manufacturing has direct presence only in China and India, working through business partners in the rest of Asia. In India, it acquired a business partner earlier this year, as the quickest way to set up operations in India, according to Tofteland. The new Bangalore-based subsidiary, SoftBrands Manufacturing India will offer direct implementation and support of Fourth Shift to customers in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma, and Bangladesh.
