Frontier ERP (Friedman Corporation)
| Vendor | Friedman Corporation (Vela Software Group / Constellation Software) |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, USA |
| Ownership | Vela Software Group, an operating group of Constellation Software Inc. (TSX: CSU) |
| Deployment | IBM i (Power Systems); vendor-hosted cloud or on-premises |
| Target market | Make-to-order, configure-to-order, and engineer-to-order manufacturers (US mid-market) |
| Industries | Windows and doors, cabinetry, building products, furniture, window fashions, metal fabrication, industrial equipment |
| Pricing | Not published; quote-based |
| Website | friedmancorp.com |
What Frontier ERP is
Frontier ERP from Friedman Corporation serves manufacturers that design, build, modify, or assemble configurable products. At its center sits a parametric product configurator that encodes engineering logic: dimensions, tolerances, material compatibility, pricing rules. Only variants the plant can actually build make it into a quote or an order.
Around that configurator the system layers order management, shop floor execution, supply chain, and financials, aimed squarely at make-to-order, configure-to-order, and engineer-to-order manufacturers.
Where Frontier ERP comes from
Founded in 1980, Friedman Corporation is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Four decades of specialization in configuration-driven manufacturing software stand behind the product.
Ownership today runs through the Vela Software Group, one of the operating groups of Constellation Software Inc., the Toronto-listed consolidator of vertical-market software businesses. The technical base is IBM i (Power Systems), a platform lineage reaching back to the AS/400 era. Development has not stopped: the vendor currently promotes a Frontier 4.0 generation alongside web components such as eWebServices and the eQuote Dealer quoting portal.
Modules and capabilities
Coverage spans the quote-to-cash cycle for custom products. The configurator drives sales order entry, dealer and distributor quoting through eQuote Dealer, and machine-readable integration through eWebServices and Data Broker interfaces.
Operations get manufacturing management with an embedded manufacturing execution system (MES) for shop floor control, plus purchasing, inventory, and supply chain management. General ledger, receivables, payables, and costing are in the package too. A mid-market manufacturer can therefore run commercial and operational processes in one system instead of stitching a configurator onto a generic ERP and maintaining that seam forever.
Best-fit companies
North American manufacturers of dimension-driven, option-heavy products. Reference industries include windows and doors, kitchen and bath cabinetry, building products, furniture and fixtures, window fashions such as shades and blinds, promotional products, industrial equipment, and metal fabrication.
The typical buyer is a mid-market make-to-order manufacturer selling through dealer or distributor channels, where accurate configured quoting is a daily bottleneck rather than an occasional annoyance.
Licensing, hosting, cost
Two deployment options, both on IBM i: cloud-hosted by the vendor on IBM i infrastructure, or installed on a customer's own Power Systems hardware. This is not multi-tenant SaaS in the sense of a browser-native modern suite.
Friedman publishes no list prices. Licensing and hosting are quoted individually per project. Budget planning should combine vendor quotes with a structured total cost of ownership calculation covering licenses, hosting or hardware, implementation, and the configurator modeling effort. That last line item is the one buyers underestimate most often.
Our take
Frontier is a niche product in the best sense of the word. For building-products and similar configure-to-order manufacturers selling through dealers, the engineering-rules configurator goes deeper than what horizontal mid-market ERPs deliver out of the box, and those competitors usually need a third-party CPQ tool bolted on to come close.
The IBM i foundation cuts both ways. Famously stable, yes, and Constellation ownership generally means long product lifecycles and steady maintenance rather than aggressive reinvention. It also implies a specific skills profile that is not getting easier to hire for.
Skip Frontier if your products are standard catalog items, if you are a pure distributor, or if your IT strategy is standardizing on mainstream cloud stacks with published pricing. Configurator depth is the whole reason to pay for this system, and without option-heavy products you would be carrying complexity you never use; broader alternatives are worth comparing in a structured selection process. Dealer-channel make-to-order manufacturers, on the other hand, will struggle to justify leaving it off a shortlist.
What the Frontier ERP (Friedman Corporation) website looks like
Current view of the vendor homepage, captured by our editorial team.
