Mark Lilly, president and CEO of software developer LillyWorks, says his company is onto something. "What we have here could be as big as the invention of MRP (materials resource planning) or the creation of finite scheduling," he says. Managing workflow is just one function of the LillyWorks's cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. However, leadership sees enough promise in the roughly two-year-old Production Flow Manufacturing (PFM) scheduling system to offer it as a standalone module that integrates with any other ERP software. As the user base expands, the company has been investigating how machine learning might expand that promise by making the system's predictive analytics capability more precise, more automated and broader in scope.