Jon Fred

Jon Fred's career has been more or less evenly split, for over thirty years, between the development and implementation of business application software of the kind that, today, falls under the general heading of ERP.

Jon began working mostly in accounting applications in the mid 1970's. He moved to job costing (estimating, quoting and performance measurement) in the late '70s. From there Jon became involved for several years in the development and implementation of what were then called MRP systems. In the early and mid '80s Jon concentrated (as a subcontractor working mostly in development) on adapting MRP systems to Aerospace and Defense (A&D) contractors. From the late '80s to the mid '90s, Jon designed and implemented middleware applications for integrating shop floor data collection to MRP systems, mainly in support of production scheduling and costing processes. From the mid '90s to the recent past, Jon returned to the A&D world where he designed, wrote and implemented middleware interfaces for creating complex cost transactions and sharing them between unconnected ERP systems.

During this entire span, Jon found that the subject matter and business techniques of manufacturing software have changed remarkably little, but the computing environment (as is to be expected) has changed utterly. More significantly, the business of creating and delivering manufacturing software has changed unrecognizably and not universally for the better. As an industry, we have learned an enormous amount about developing complex, reliable systems, but we have not learned nearly as much about delivering them. We still fail far too often to implement solid, mature products in companies that routinely succeed at what would appear to be far more difficult projects.

As a principal of Adaptive Growth, Jon's focus is on system acquisition and implementation. Over the years he has seen many projects succeed and, in retrospect and without exception, these projects were managed in ways that virtually guaranteed their success. Jon has seen other projects fail entirely and many more achieve varying degrees of partial success. These projects also share one stark, common characteristic: they failed to manage one or more of a few common, recurring risks, and they ran into trouble as a direct result.

Over time, we've come to appreciate that success in software implementation is best understood in terms of the avoidance of failure. Risk management has become our theme.

At Adaptive Growth, we've undertaken the task of laying out the practical causes of both success and failure, and delivering this knowledge to our clients in concentrated doses of usable technique.

Jon has a BA in an entirely unrelated subject from a small college, which he dimly remembers with great fondness.

Adaptive Growth, Inc.
2021 Midwest Road
Suite 200
Oak Brook, IL 60523
(630)443-7790 Office
(630)443-7796 Fax
jfrano@adaptivegrowth.com


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