This post starts with a trivia question: Please name the mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor that has existed the longest in the market with an ERP product that has never been merged with another product? In addition, the vendor and its product offerings have never been covered by TEC and myself. As a hint, the company was founded in 1979 and has always focused on discrete make-to-order (MTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing.

Is there anyone out there wanting to venture a guess? If more hints are needed, it is not MAPICS XA, which was founded in 1977 by IBM, but now belongs to Infor and is currently called Infor ERP Discrete iEnterprise (and before that had changed many ownerships and shared a roof with other ERP products). SYSPRO has been independent since 1978, but has been a frequent topic on this site. It is not QAD either, which has been independent since 1979, but TEC has repeatedly reported about this vendor (see the most recent article on the company). It is not ABAS Software AG either, which has also been independent since its founding in 1980 (TEC just published an article on the company).

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