Top Row (from left): Sandra Bryant, Inventory Control and Lean Manager for Logistics; Candace McKeever, Director of Enterprise Logistics; Amber Janey. Bottom Row (from left): Bruce King, Senior Vice President, Operations; Kevin Myers, Vice President, Materials and Supply; Lisa Minerd, President and Founder, Minerva Associates; Curt Minerd, Sales Engineer and Marketing Manager, Minerva Associates; Clay Jones, President, CEO, Chairman

Minerva Associates’ AIMS WMS is used in the logistics distribution centers for Rockwell Collins facilities in Coralville, IA, Cedar Rapids, IA, Melbourne, FL, and Mexicali, Mexico.  This is Minerva Associates second supplier award from Rockwell Collins over their 18 year relationship.  Rockwell Collins is undergoing projects to upgrade AIMS WMS to the latest release, version 10, at all of the aforementioned facilities, with new facilities coming online in Portland, OR, Calexico, CA and Richardson, TX.

Rockwell Collins wrote an excellent introduction piece on Minerva for the conference, which is posted below.  It is an honor to be nominated and receive an award from any of our customers, and Minerva Associates would like to thank the entire Rockwell Collins team involved on the AIMS upgrade project.  While awards presentations tend to focus on the immediate recipients on stage, success is dependent on all team members from both companies.  Minerva extends its sincere thanks and appreciation to the entire Rockwell Collins team, and a congratulations to the entire Minerva staff.

“Minerva Associates, a woman, minority owned small business based out of San Diego, CA, has been able to build market share in a competitive Logistics environment by providing proven solutions to manufacturers and distribution centers around the world.  They stay on the cutting edge of the software solution business by continuing to offer new functionality that improves service to their customer base.

They are the founder of the Warehouse Management System now used at Rockwell Collins’ Enterprise Logistics Distribution Centers.  The tool is called AIMS (Advanced Inventory Management Software) and it currently tracks 12 million annual transactions as the interface between each warehouse operator and SAP. Working together with Rockwell Collins during the implementation of this system, Minerva Associates warehouse management system has provided Rockwell Collins a 50% improvement in productivity, set the stage for world class inventory accuracy and managed the electronic delivery of over one million daily interface documents to Rockwell Collins servers.

Additionally, Minerva Associates achieved zero DPPM in 2010 & 2011 and has never received a corrective action.

The partnership between Rockwell Collins and Minerva Associates, Inc. is an intimate collaboration that has allowed for tandem design and development of new functionality to support material flow and greatly increase our efficiency.  Minerva supports Rockwell Collins’ key business objectives through openness, ownership, and urgency.

Congratulations to Minerva Associates, Inc. on winning the Rockwell Collins Small Business award.”

The main reason AIMS does not have a SaaS offering in the public cloud is simple: control.  AIMS is an enterprise application responsible for efficiently and accurately shipping product.  While cloud systems are designed to be extremely robust and redundant, they are by nature extremely complex.  Utilizing a large hardware infrastructure allows providers to offer outstanding resources at great pricing, but an outage is beyond your control, mitigation is beyond your control, and nothing is more infuriating than refreshing online system status dashboards, waiting.  In our opinion, putting a mission-critical software component in the public could is simply dangerous.  Cloud reliability will continue to improve and already scales wonderfully, but keeping your ERP and WMS within your own controlled environment is definitely best practice, to say nothing of industries that cannot comply with security regulations by keeping data in the public cloud.

There are a number of cloud technologies that our customers utilize in their computing environments.  AIMS is transparent to a virtualized environment, the majority of our customers utilize some form of virtualization in their datacenters.  Our larger customers run AIMS in a clustered environment for absolute performance and redundancy to maintain their 99.999% uptime requirements.  Minerva’s own internal development and testing is done in a private cloud environment, with multiple physical machines pooled in a high availability virtual environment.

Of course as a technology company, we never say never.  There may very well be a SaaS version of AIMS in the public cloud sometime in the future.  And a number of online properties and developers could only exist with the scalability and resources offered by providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as reedit, four square, and Smugmug.  Smugmug CEO Don MacAskill had an excellent blog entry on how they survived the April 2011 AWS outage with superb design considerations.  However, in our opinion, maintaining control over your mission-critical environment for ERP and WMS systems is still the best solution for maintaining reliable systems operations.

The current OS of choice for the rugged enterprise devices used for WMS transactions is based on Windows CE, a mobile version of Windows.  It has familiar programming frameworks used for many business applications on the desktop such as .Net and Java, allowing software firms to take advantage of the (mostly) same tools for desktop and mobile development.  Windows CE even on a small screen has a user interface that is familiar to the vast majority of users.  The introduction of iOS and Android into the smartphone/tablet market for consumers showed a number of Windows CE’s long tolerated flaws: poor touch input response, underpowered components, and ease of use.  The two new mobile operating systems that will invade mobile RF computers used in WMS implementations will be Android and Windows 8, barring any announcements from Apple regarding a rugged barcode scanning iPod Touch-like device (such a device does exist in Apple retail locations running custom POS software, but they are not making them for sale or available to third party software developers) or a remarkable come-back from the embattled Blackberry maker Research in Motion.

A number of rugged enterprise device manufacturers have announced or will announce Android equipped units this year.  These new tablets and handhelds will add a number of specialized features compared to their consumer brethren, mainly rugged IP/MIL-STD ratings for harsh industrial environments, and software support for RFID and barcode scanners, necessary components for any device in the warehouse or stockroom.  Android has a large developer community and a head start over it’s closer competitor, Microsoft’s Windows 8.  The successor to Windows CE was the answer to the iPhone and first Android smartphones, called Windows Phone 7.  WP7 is NOT the successor to Windows CE in the rugged enterprise device space.  That successor is Windows 8, touted to run on desktops and tablet form factors.  Windows 8 aims to address the shortfalls of Windows CE on mobile touch-enabled devices, and to support the new power efficient processor architectures powering tablets and RF mobile computers.

How will it shake out?  Great question.  On one hand the geek in all of us rejoices as innovation rapidly accelerates in the mobile device space.  On the other hand, we panic that the slower hand of enterprise procurement will render just purchased units obsolete or that employment longevity is dependent on picking the winning platform.  Fear not.

AIMS is advancing in 2012 with some great new features.  AIMS already runs on mobile versions of Windows, and will expand to run natively on Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices.  Windows 8 support will follow after its release to take advantage of new rugged mobile devices utilizing the platform.  So IT and procurement specialists can relax, AIMS will support a variety of mobile platforms.  A formal announcement is forthcoming in 2012, and if you are anything like us, we hope you are eagerly anticipating the challenges and rewards of the changing landscape.

For several years Minerva has made a donation to the World Food Programme in lieu of sending paper holiday cards, and it has turned into a cherished tradition.  The WFP is a UN organization dedicated to eradicating hunger across the world and responding to food crises.  We have never had the uncertainty of when our next meal might arrive, a feeling felt too often around the world.  We hope you will join us in helping to remedy a very curable condition.

Happy Holidays!

Minerva staff

• Receiving of purchase orders and work orders
• Work order and sales order fulfillment (picking)
• Best-fit system-directed putaway (slotting) for finished goods, raw materials and component parts
• Pack & Ship with full audit capabilities
• Outbound consolidation
• Full ABC cycle count features
• Rreplenishment
• VAS
• Interface to OMNIS ERP system

Apeks is a world leader in designing and manufacturing SCUBA regulators and diving equipment, part of the Aqua Lung International family.  AIMS WMS for Apeks is scheduled to go into production in Q4 2011.

Curt Minerd, Sales Engineer and Marketing Manager