Front Runners: Meet the Solution Providers That Operate on the Front Lines with Wonderware Distributors and Customers Worldwide

Our Front Lines feature includes an interview with Bill Sherwood, president of Progressive Software Solutions or PS2. PS2 has headquarters in Albany, Oregon. They’ve been a Wonderware® System Integrator (SI) since 1994 and achieved ArchestrA® Certification as soon as the program was introduced in 2003.

Thanks for giving us your time today, Bill. We'd like to hear what you can tell us about PS2 – your company philosophy, any special practices, what makes you unique.

Bill: The most unique thing about what we do for a living is in our philosophy of "All Wonderware, all the time." And there are some challenges when you commit to a tag line like that, because you do limit yourself in projects with competitors of Wonderware. They know that you’re simply not going to implement their stuff. Back in 1994 when we got our start we’d get calls from Rockwell and Intellution about projects, and then it was a tougher call commercially to simply back off if you found you couldn’t convert the project to Wonderware. Now, though, I think that as much as you know it, they know it too. So we don't get those calls so much anymore. And fortunately we picked a horse that is one of the leaders in the manufacturing space and continues to be, so in hindsight that turns out to have been a VERY good decision.

What about your company capabilities? I.e., employees, certifications, and special qualifications?

Bill: Not too surprisingly, our capabilities coincide directly with the Wonderware suite of products. We do provide some level of PLC-type control capability but we don’t try to maintain in-house process design expertise. We all learn what we need to on the project, but we don’t try to, for instance, design a cheese plant or tell you what flow meter to use in a particular application. We usually get the project after P&IDs have been created. Then we write the control system functional description, the design guidelines, around those P&IDs. And we go up from there. Now one of the most exciting things that happened with the most recent acquisition by Wonderware is that we've always sold ourselves around dealing with that upper layer. We like to do that MES layer, the enterprise integration, the business systems layer. Way back even before the release of the Wonderware Enterprise Integration module — even when InTrack was still called Chinook — that's where we were working to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

So about how big is the company?

Bill: We're about a $4 million company; most of that is services. We don't buy a whole lot of software; we obviously influence the customers to have it be Wonderware. We have our own internal engineering product, the specification management product called WebSpec; that’s about a half-million dollar business line for us. And we do that with about 25 employees. We are fairly flat and stable; Tim Fief and I tend to have our hands in most projects in one way or another. In terms of certifications, we do believe we have the most certifications on Industrial Application Server of any company near our size. But understand where that came from: we did the technical support function for our local distributor for about six years back in our early history, so we were getting certified on everything that came out. And that’s been our philosophy since, that every application engineer needs to get certified in a product every six months. That keeps them fresh, and even if you’re doing an InControl project, we’ve got certified people who can do it.

What has been the company history?

Bill: Tim Fief and I basically started it together. As far as our roles go, I tend to do the President role and the business side, and Tim tends to be more like the Chief Technology Officer. He decides when technologies are ready to roll out to customers. We talk about leading edge versus bleeding edge, and that's where Tim comes in.

Where are your office locations and what's your geographical coverage?

Bill: Our geographical coverage is global. We don't actively sell to places outside the U.S. We work through distribution and with end-users who might have a global presence. We might be doing a project for somebody here in the Northwest but the installation might be in Singapore.

But your main offices are there in the Northwest, right?

Bill: Well, that's actually not quite true. Our home office and the majority of our HR functions are done out of our office in Oregon, but we have satellite offices in Washington state, Connecticut and northern California.

What industries do you find yourselves busiest in?

Bill: Well, it seems that Wonderware has just labeled us as the Food and the Consumer Packaged Goods guys. I'm fine with that, even though I do hate to be limited because we do a lot of work in aerospace and discrete manufacturing as well. But it's true, for the last three or four years probably 60% of our work really has been in food and CPG. Now back in the day when Tim and I were pounding the keyboard and writing software every day, probably 90% of our work was in wood products. If you look at our web site and look at the Wonderware website you'll find as far as industry focus, though, it's identical, and that's on purpose. Again, if you do nothing but Wonderware, you should be in every vertical market that Wonderware is in as well.

What technology levels do you support? I.e., instruments/hardware, process automation, supervisory control, manufacturing operations, enterprise systems?

Bill: If a customer knows us for one thing, I don't want that thing to be — for us to be known as — that general, independent, generic SI. Because we're not generic. We're all Wonderware, all the time. And we like the upper level products. I think that separates us in the mind of the end-user from the guys down at the PLC level doing pure machine control.

Tell us about your first Wonderware project.

Bill: I can still see the day — and this was over 15 years ago — it was for the city of Albany, and it was a Bailey Net 90 upgrade to InTouch. We were using the Net 90 I/O server and we had never done a project. We had a couple of engineers and we decided this must be a good idea, so we made a break from another SI. We were scared to death to even turn it on. We were there on purpose at around 8 o'clock at night so in case something happened we could get it back. And I remember we turned it on and just watched everything come to life on the screen.

Now we are really proud of the fact that before now we really have not seen the level of SI involvement in a product launch that we've just seen with the InTouch 10.0 and System Platform 3.0 release. And you guys have been right in the middle of that, from the start. What stands out in your mind from that experience?

Bill: I think the biggest thing is what you just said — we have never been asked to be engaged at that level before. We have converted at least a dozen InTouch applications — some of them fairly sophisticated — to InTouch 10.0. When you do nothing but Wonderware over the years you develop quite a library of custom controls and tools, and we migrated all those. And the big surprise that really wasn't a surprise is...they WORK! They all just worked.

With the new symbols and the tools, well, we have guys who've spent hours and hours on dithering and shading to get the look that we pride ourselves on as being a PS2 implementation. And now I'm double-clicking and dragging and dropping, and that's a huge deal for us to see it come to that level where we can still get that PS2 look and feel and quality without so much work.

As far as advantages for us and for our customers, it could come right out of what we presented at the launch event in September. It's about the common development studio, reduction of errors with reuse of objects and templates, the collaborative team development environment. With the .NET scripting engine, I can bring in a new programmer who's familiar with those Microsoft technologies and have them be productive in a matter of hours. And the quicker I can get those guys up there on the A-team with reusable software and tools, the better off we all are.

Now, the last thing we want to ask — and we asked a version of this question of our panel at Sales and Marketing Conference — but we'd like to hear from you, Bill: Is what do you think is the one thing that Wonderware and our System Integrator community HAVE to get right in the next 12 months?

Bill: I think that we have a united front around our MES or P&PM offering, with the new Factelligence products in the mix. I understand the product, and I talk to your sales people and my friends at other key SI's and they feel the same way. We need to have a united front, and a strategy on what it means to implement. And we don't want to miss that window. That's a strategy that everybody in marketing and sales and the SI's as well needs to get engaged with.

Well, thank you, Bill. That's just what we needed, and now we'll let you get back to running a successful system integrator business. Good luck!

If you’d like to know more about Progressive Software Solutions you can check out their SI profile at www.wonderware.com or visit their website at www.ps2inc.com.

Contacting Progressive Software Solutions

Progressive Software Solutions, Inc.
3939 Old Salem Rd. Suite 100
Albany Oregon, 97321 U.S.A.
Tel (541) 924-1741
Fax 541) 924-1821
www.ps2inc.com