Introducing AppCentral, the All-in-One AI-Powered Platform: Q&A With Aptean Leadership

At the Aptean UNITE 2024 customer conference, we unveiled AppCentral, our new all-in-one business software platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI). With a wide range of pre-connected, industry-specific applications available and the innovative Aptean AI Assistant to provide guidance and support, it’s a groundbreaking new offering with nearly limitless scalability and smart automations that boost efficiency.

While the first bundle of apps launched on AppCentral are tailored for discrete manufacturers, we’ll be adding many more in the coming months to support the food and beverage, transportation and apparel markets as well. The overwhelmingly positive reception from current Aptean clients and palpable excitement at UNITE serve to underscore that this is only the beginning of a promising new era for enterprise software.

To better understand how AppCentral furthers Aptean’s mission to help our customers innovate and what makes the platform different from anything else on the market, we sat down with TVN Reddy, Aptean CEO (TVN), and Jenny Peng, Aptean CTO (JP). Their insights on the platform and its potential to revolutionize the business technology industry reveal just how impactful it will be.

Q: How does AppCentral align with Aptean’s long-term vision?

TVN: Aptean’s long-term vision is to provide unparalleled solutions for manufacturers and distributors around the world. The way we choose to do it with AppCentral is providing very powerful, purpose-built, vertically focused applications—we call them “apps” in the AppCentral language—combined with functionalities to automate workflows from taking customers’ orders, manufacturing the goods, maintaining their equipment, driving efficiency of operations, all the way to last-mile shipping.

The platform has the ability to automate the end-to-end operations of our customers through a number of apps that are working very cohesively, value-enhanced by AI every step of the way. Whether it be a single task or end-to-end automation, AppCentral provides a significant value proposition unlike any other.

Q: What differentiates AppCentral from other platforms on the market?

JP: AppCentral is a game changer. Here's what I believe is going to differentiate us in the market. No. 1 is—and TVN talked about this—purpose-built apps. They’re vertically focused and very tailored to the specific industries that we serve.

But we want to do more than that. These apps are going to be pre-connected, with a unified experience for accessing and interacting with them, adding value for our customers in their respective industries. They’re backed by a unified data lake, including the data and documents of the individual applications. And we're able to layer on top AI capabilities that span across the various different functions that our customers have in their back office.

Imagine the type of insights that you're able to mine from the unified data, repository of documents and standard operating procedures. You can find answers to your questions. We’re taking it to the next level with this enterprise intelligence such that we're able to now add value for our customers and give them the information they need to make decisions. And we're able to build in automations for interconnected workflows.

The last point of differentiation is changing the user experience through interacting with our customers. In addition to the core vertical capabilities, we're layering on top education and training, and users can make enhancement requests, open up a support ticket, give us feedback and download their invoices.

You can think of numerous use cases for this platform. So, I think it's a game changer in terms of the vertical industry-specific capabilities, but it's also a game changer because we're evolving the experience of working with our customers and making it bidirectional, tailored and personalized.

TVN: If you think about the enterprise software industry, investing in enterprise software is a big deal, right? Companies have to set up their teams and make big purchasing decisions, and it takes months—sometimes years. And there’s a high failure rate in implementations.

So, all of that is very hard, and meanwhile businesses have their own thing to do—they have to produce and ship goods. They don't really have time to implement software. So, the purpose of AppCentral is making these apps very consumable, sometimes do-it-yourself in terms of implementation, so customers can see the functionality working right away.

For example, thinking about our OEE Pulse application, we ship a box of sensors to the customer, they set them up themselves and in a couple of hours they start seeing real-time monitoring.

Our mission is to continue to develop these apps to be consumable in incremental fashion so that customers can continue to run their business rather than pausing to conduct a big software implementation. And step by step, they’re digitizing their infrastructure, facilitating the flow of data, allowing for AI to help with their end-to-end operations and taking themselves to the next level.

We want to radically change how enterprise software is consumed in the industry. That's very, very exciting for us as we speak with all our customers, and they're super excited about that capability to take one bite at a time instead of doing a big implementation.

Especially if you think about the customers that don't have a big IT staff, right? They have a small number of people, and they might not have the expertise for traditional implementations. That’s why we make it very logical and simple for them to do. They can choose to do it one solution at a time. That's the best way for them to use the software and power of AI throughout their infrastructure. It allows them to drive efficiency and compete in whatever industry they’re in.

JP: You’re right on about the bite size—I love how you put that TVN. I remember when we were talking about the original AppCentral idea, we had this concept of composable architecture, making it easy and bite-size so that customers are able to learn about the added value of these very purpose-built apps.

So, we're focusing on making these activations and configurations very easy for them. There's still a lot more to do, but there’s so much added value in these vertically specialized solutions and apps. If we're able to deploy them and make them available in AppCentral, implementation can take place according to the customer's timeline.

They can figure out when is the right time to deploy them, and we’ll work with the business to make sure they understand the value of these apps. The idea is that everything is at their fingertips and on their timeline. We know that’s part of the value that we're delivering, and it's very exciting.

Q: How does AppCentral enable Aptean to remain competitive in the market?

TVN: AppCentral changes the game. Today, we’re competing by offering a product, or multiple products within one solution. Each is itself pretty big and takes a long time to implement, and we have to sell them each individually to customers.

And on the buyer’s side, we’re selling different software to different people. For example, we're selling an ERP to an IT manager. We're selling our shop floor solutions to a plant manager, and our transportation solutions to the transportation department. AppCentral is uniquely positioned in that it's one platform where different pre-built apps are interconnected and integrated.

So, our customers don't need to worry about integration. They can start leveraging multiple solutions right away. It makes it so much easier to consume our product, so our customers see the value. They can actually see everything that AppCentral can do for them in one place. And that changes how we position our products and solutions.

It's really about transforming the supply chain end to end. I don't know of any other company in the market today that can actually do that for the industries we serve. So that’s absolutely going to be a differentiator for us, and it’s how we’ll transform the enterprise software industry.

JP: The real differentiator is the interconnected nature of the applications. That allows us to focus on solving business problems. Our customers need to optimize, transform and find their next great strategy, rather than trying to figure out which solutions to use and how the pieces fit together. We've got that taken care of.

So how we really stand out is by allowing our customers to focus on their business, instead of their technology. We take care of the technology, and our customers can focus on what gets them that winning position in the market.

TVN: Aptean acquires a lot of businesses. In any given year, we probably acquire seven to 10 businesses. AppCentral can serve as a great platform for all our acquired products, making the value and deep functionality of them available to all our existing customers very quickly.

It also benefits the companies we acquire. When we acquire them and bring them on to AppCentral, they get access to the thousands of customers we have in our portfolio and can sell their products to them. And it helps the customers consume them quickly.

AppCentral also helps Aptean monetize our acquisitions by providing the solutions very quickly to a large launch base of customers.

JP: From Day One, the acquired companies get huge value added from the base capabilities of AppCentral and all of the common apps that are readily available on the platform.

Q: What does the launch of AppCentral mean for Aptean employees?

JP: For our employees, what's really exciting as I watch AppCentral come to life is the learning opportunities. For example, our first solution bundle is for the discrete manufacturing industry. In the past, the teams that work on Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP Made2Manage Edition focused on just Made2Manage, and the team that works on Aptean Ship concentrated on that solution only.

But with AppCentral, we have to work together, and we have to learn the whole range of products. So, the biggest and brightest moment will be when our employees realize that Aptean has a lot to offer. When all of these solutions come together, we're stronger, we're better, and we have a lot that we can provide for our customers.

Learning the functionality of the products, the technology behind them and solving a very challenging problem should all bring satisfaction in and of themselves. But when we went live with our beta customer, we heard the validation, the fruit of our labor. We saw how it resonates.

And for the customers, they get to uncover how wonderful it is when these applications work together. Hearing our beta customers say, “I can actually stop paying for this other service, because your solution has it all,” that makes everyone’s day to hear that validation.

There's a lot of excitement among our employees as they realize that what they're doing is valuable. What they're doing is something that's unprecedented, and that goes a long way in driving engagement and having a purpose.

Q: How has AppCentral been received so far?

TVN: We're here at the UNITE conference, and we've presented AppCentral. We have booths here, and Jenny presented onstage and shared our vision for AppCentral. The excitement among both the customers and employees is very contagious. We're getting very positive feedback. And the rave review from the customer who's been helping on the beta version of the product has been phenomenal.

So yeah, we're very excited about this product. We knew when we initially developed the concept about a year ago that not every product we launch is going to get great feedback. But this one, so far from what we've seen, is definitely exceeding our expectations in terms of customer excitement. As we talk to customers, they're asking, “When do I get it?” and “How can I pilot it?” They want to know how they can participate in this exciting innovation.

Like I was saying, we make acquisitions, so a lot of employees and businesses are joining us every year. But they still operate in pockets. What I love about AppCentral is that it actually showcases the breadth of Aptean’s offerings. It actually brings them together, and the whole is significantly greater than the sum of the parts. It gets exponentially better by bringing it all together.

For customers, it actually helps them operate, especially when you put it all together along with the ever-evolving AI. We have a grand vision for how we’ll incorporate AI to optimize customers’ supply chains. That really showcases the power of Aptean and all the solutions that we have that are very, very strong.

And to top it off, they’re each the leading solution for their specific vertical markets. So we bring it all together into a solution that can transform our target industries and transform our customers’ supply chains. From the all the feedback we've received this week, we're absolutely on the right track. We’ve just got to keep adding more apps.

AppCentral: The Future Is Here

As an organization, Aptean is committed to serving our target markets and equipping our customers with the technology they need to succeed in competitive, fast-paced environments. We’re never content to settle for the status quo, always looking to push the envelope and expand the boundaries of business software so that manufacturers, processors, distributors and wholesalers can continue to grow.

In that way, AppCentral is a testament to our dedication and relentlessly innovative spirit. We imagined the bright possibility of a comprehensive, pre-integrated platform with embedded AI capabilities, and then we made it a reality. Now, we’re thrilled to bring it to the market so that current and future customers can benefit from the comprehensive, vertically tailored functionality and robust intelligence we’ve developed.

Of course, this is just the initial launch of the solution, with many more industry-specific apps and cutting-edge innovations to come in the future. We’ll soon be expanding the offering beyond discrete manufacturing so that even more organizations around the world can leverage what is no doubt a transformative product.

Until then, don’t hesitate to contact us with questions, and feel free to explore AppCentral for yourself. When you’re ready to move forward, you can request pricing or a personalized demo to take the next step.