Manufacturers across the country rely heavily on their MRP or ERP systems to automate the handling of resources. That’s what the “R” stands for, after all. But it turns out that MRP and ERP systems leave a whole lot to be desired when it actually comes to managing resources–including raw materials and labor–on the shop floor. That’s where companies like Crossroads RMC and its manufacturing execution system (MES) comes into play.

Crossroads RMC was founded more than 20 years ago to develop automation solutions for the factory floor. The Lisle, Illinois, company originally developed its Crossroads MES solution in the

More than anything else, IBM is a systems company, and it always has been. We could argue about whether or not Big Blue should have ever exited the application software business, as it started to do in the late 1980s and finished off doing in the early 1990s, but I don’t think there would be much of an argument that IBM has been and should continue to be a supplier of full systems of servers, storage, networking, and systems software like operating systems, middleware, and databases.

Thankfully, even IBM does not seem to be of two minds about this, as

The proving ground for significant IT projects is far less about speed than it is about endurance. And when you can hear about a project that was completed, it’s so much more interesting than listening to a sales pitch for technology that can take you someplace that no one has yet to travel and may be a place no sane person wants to go. Tried and tested beats new and full of promise for a lot of people despite the drumbeating that is designed to defeat anything that adheres to a slow-growth philosophy.

This story is about a six-year-old project.

Where IT is concerned, the United States has functioned as a nurselog for India’s booming IT sector. Soon after American management discovered that India’s cheap, plentiful, educated labor could produce cheap, plentiful, sophisticated software, so began the greatest job migration since clothing manufacturers fled the country. The skies over India darkened with incoming hardware, software specs careened off satellites, and Tower-of-Babel help desks were born.

It was a rocky start, marked by resentment from threatened American workers, and cultural and language incompatibilities that plagued their Indian counterparts. But eventually everyone settled into the new normal. American IT moved on, specializing

It’s been just about two years since IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) was introduced. IBM didn’t make a lot of noise about it. Maybe that’s because IBM doesn’t market products. It markets ideas. On the other hand, it might be because ACS delivered system administration with navigation features that most people have been working with for 10 to 15 years–features such as the capabilities to drag and drop, scroll down a page, and use a mouse instead of F keys.

IBM i Access Client Solutions is a replacement for the severely haggard iAccess for Windows, a product with thousands