Apriso, a leading provider of manufacturing software solutions, today announced availability of a global product traceability solution designed specifically for aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturers. This industry is largely defined by complexity in designs and supply chains, so having near real time traceability and containment is critical for both compliance and efficiencies. Leveraging Apriso's proven industry experience, this solution addresses complex global manufacturing challenges by consolidating traceability data from disparate systems in the plants to help prevent non-conforming product from entering the supply chain, or beyond.

"Many executives today believe they already have the needed information in existing systems. Unfortunately, though, this almost always falls short during an actual adverse event or mock recall. Typically, data is in distributed systems or paper-based systems and cannot be retrieved or brought together in the needed time frame to be useful," said Matthew Littlefield, President and Principal Analyst, LNS Research.*

Unlike competing enterprise applications, Apriso's A&D Global Traceability and Containment solution is designed to consolidate genealogy and traceability events at a granular level. These events, consisting of traceability and genealogy data, are extracted from existing manufacturing systems across multiple business units and geographies, and then consolidated into a single, global repository. By combining this centralized repository with native BPM and workflow capabilities, greater collaboration across all sites can be achieved to quickly identify and resolve quality and compliance issues.

If a quality failure does occur, this Apriso solution helps to orchestrate containment activities across plants to prevent nonconforming items from "escaping" into the supply chain, and ultimately, reaching the end user. Based on Apriso's years of experience in helping global A&D customers extract and aggregate actionable intelligence, Global Traceability and Containment provides a collaborative and flexible solution that helps A&D manufactures cost-effectively and proactively address product quality while meeting evolving regulatory mandates, such as NDAA 2011 and internationally recognized quality management standards such as AS9100.

"Due to ever-changing industry, government and company regulations, A&D manufacturers must now address highly complex, global manufacturing challenges that result from speed of innovation as well as the uncertainty of government defense spending," said Rick Gallisa, Industry Director, Apriso. "The wealth of knowledge our team has accumulated working with the foremost A&D companies in the world to address these challenges has led us to offer an industry solution that truly gives A&D manufacturers the value and efficiency needed, without having to customize existing systems or fund costly new software upgrade projects."

"Our proven track record demonstrates an ability to quickly deploy to multi-site clients. This expertise coupled with a robust global manufacturing platform and strong collaboration with business intelligence technologies from Microsoft delivers a highly robust industry solution that is a 'must have' for the aerospace and defense manufacturing industry," added Mr. Gallisa.