Having a vision statement should mean that you have a vision that strive to bring into existence. It should mean leaving the world better than how you found it. I looked at the vision statements of the five biggest manufacturing software companies and they are all about “customer-focus” and “innovation.”

Unfortunately for their customers, these companies don’t operate in line with their vision. They are focused only on revenue and profitability. They have closed-source, legacy products that should have been moth-balled years ago. They have sales and service models that demonstrate every day that the way to increase revenue is to make sure that the customer doesn’t improve too much.

It’s a sad situation when manufacturing customers enter deals with these software giants knowing that they’re going to get screwed. Yet, they still go through with it just hoping to minimize the damage. It’s time for the manufacturing industry to understand the adage that “when someone shows you who they are you should believe them.”

The Libre Vision

In our vision we try to be clear about both what we want to do, for whom we want to do it and how we want to go about it:

Libre will provide sustainable continuous improvement to most of the world’s manufacturers by delivering an open-source manufacturing operating system and a marketplace of modern applications to easily and affordably implement manufacturing software solutions.

What could global manufacturing look like?

• It’s a world where establishment of operational baselines and observability of basic performance metrics are freely available to every company. In our world, providing that value is “table stakes” for any software vendor.
• It’s a world where “partner” means bidirectional flow of ideas and value. Not software vendors bleeding customers for every dollar available and providing little value while always setting up the next sale.
• It’s a world where a license sale only happens after a software vendor has provided real value to the customer. Future value is shown through an iterative roadmap that enables licenses to be justified through Net Present Value that far exceeds cost.
• And, most importantly, it’s a world where a community rises up and bands together to provide collective value for. It removes the software vendors that are known to be bad actors and those that don’t have the community’s best interest in mind.

If you share our vision, take the time to become part of the growing community. Connect with others of the same mind on the Libre Discord server.