Jason Prater’s story, and the story of Creo Solutions, starts with a combination of manufacturing and technology. Jason grew up in metro Detroit. The family business was a small manufacturing company.

“Unlike most kids, whose weekends started with Saturday morning cartoons, mine started with getting doughnuts and going to work at the shop with my family,” he remembers. “Running a lathe, recording time tickets, helping with payroll – whatever needed to be done, I did it.”

Those early lessons in manufacturing from his family gave him an understanding of the hard work and innovation it takes to make manufacturing successful. They were the foundation of his education in manufacturing and later in technology.

“I studied computer science,” he says, “because I was drawn to the rapid pace of innovation in that field. You could dream something in the morning and deliver it that night.”

After college, he went to work at a major cloud-based ERP provider, developing technology to support manufacturing. But, his roots in manufacturing were strong and he was drawn back to the family business.

There, he had the opportunity to use some of the technology solutions he had developed, in some cases they weren’t as good as they could be, and he could see they could be made better and more effective.

Mobility, it became clear to him, was a challenge in the manufacturing environment. The people involved in the processes are always moving, but because they’re moving, it often made their interaction with technology difficult and/or time-consuming. But, mobility isn’t just about the people, he realized, it extends to the things that manufacturers make. Manufacturers buy raw materials, do their magic, and then sell what they make to someone. Since the dawn of manufacturing, the hardest thing to know is what’s going on through that entire process, according to Jason. “What’s the ‘magic’?”

Much of the magic is in knowing where the raw materials are, how they are moving through the manufacturing process, where the finished products are warehoused, and when they ship. Jason realized that understanding, efficiently managing, and effectively supporting that process with mobile technology solutions helped make the magic happen.

With this renewed insight, he returned to the cloud ERP provider, and began developing technology solutions for manufacturing with a new pragmatism. Working his way from a position as a Developer/Team Leader, to Director of Development and finally to a Group Vice President role, Jason contributed many milestone developments to the company he worked for and to the industry.

But he still held an unfulfilled dream – like the one that led him to study computer science. To “dream it in the morning and deliver it that night” – on his own, through his own company. That dream became Creo Solutions and the first product of that dream is Creo Mobile Inventory Management – an app-based innovative, flexible mobile solution to a complex, time-consuming process that challenges manufacturing efficiency.