The Importance of Configurability in Maintenance Software

This week, American Machinist ran an article titled “Why Configurability Matters for Manufacturing Enterprise Software” (form fill required). In it, author Katie Hilyar details the importance of flexibility in enterprise software solutions, citing the substantial differences between the processes that companies of different sizes use to meet their objectives.

At the conclusion of the article, Hilyar outlines the following set of criteria for determining whether a particular enterprise-level software is sufficiently configurable:

– “Ability to extend your application with new functionality (e.g. business processes) not just changing the presentation of existing functions.”

– “No requirement to write or maintain software code – this is one of the key hallmarks of configuration vs. customization.”

– “Drag-and-drop modeling and design tools to rapidly define your processes.”

– “Built-in workflow automation (BPM) to save you time and improve productivity.”

It’s not often that you see a broad concept like configurability addressed in such specific terms, so we thought it might be interesting to assess ManagerPlus maintenance management software solutions using these criteria to see how we stack up.

Here’s what we found: Continue reading “The Importance of Configurability in Maintenance Software”