As the software industry begins to mature, staying fresh and relevant has become more important than ever for many vendors.

The challenge begins to multiply when the software happens to be Enterprise Resource Planning, which spans a range of interlocking business processes from manufacturing to inventory management.

SYSPRO, which has been developing ERP applications for 35 years, is one of those software companies that have endured and withstood the challenge by focusing on their core strengths with continuous innovation.

Recently SYSPRO announced a host of enhancements as part of its new Release 7, which combines personalized user interface, mobile capabilities, Big Data, vertical templates, server side reporting, as well as improvements in such areas as sales order entry, product configurator and optimized scalability for better transaction throughput.

The latest release underscores SYSPRO’s key differentiator – its relentless drive toward helping its more than 15,000 customers, primarily small and midsized distribution and manufacturing companies, succeed through incremental enhancements that could result in shaving a few points of their production costs or conducting real-time inventory checks with precision.

For these SMB customers, such cost reductions and efficiency gains could mean the difference between merely staying afloat and comfortably prevailing at the end of each fiscal year. In many respects, the basis of SYSPRO’s continuous innovation has as much to do with extending its long track record as keeping its customers successful, both of which are inextricably linked.

Prior to Release 7, SYSPRO also demonstrated its ability to continuously innovate helping customers achieve better results with Work-In-Progress costing, multi-level traceability and enhanced planning and scheduling. Through the years, SYSPRO has been incorporating the Microsoft platform ranging from Office and .net integration to Azure for Cloud deployment as well as reporting tools such as Crystal Reports into its ERP applications for added functionality and standards-based usability.  In Release 7, SYSPRO also leverages Windows 8 extensively for tile-view customization.

Founded in 1978, SYSPRO pioneered the development of accounting and manufacturing applications in an integrated system, a first of its kind in those days. Following a series of successful ERP its global footprint now represents over $300 million in product and channel revenues for the vendor and its over 1500 channel and support partners.in more than 60 countries.

What matters to these customers is not a vendor’s expensive acquisitions or market caps, but rather simple-to-use ERP applications that free them up from the onerous tasks of data collection, while making it easy for them to comply with industry regulations and ultimately leverage massive amounts of sales, production and customer information in order to generate more revenues.

Rather than pursuing outsized and/or acquisition-centric expansion plans that often end up creating compatibility problems and bloated product portfolios, SYSPRO, which remains privately-held and favors organic growth over random acquisitions, appears to have found the formula that allows it to constantly reinvent itself.

For ERP vendors like SYSPRO, staying fresh and relevant after decades of developing software requires not just the use of the latest technologies to wow users with more bells and whistles, but rather the long-term commitment to align one’s value proposition with what matters to its customers.