First Resonance

The challenge: integrations were creating friction at the worst possible times

First Resonance builds ION Factory OS, the modern Manufacturing Execution System (MES) used by 80+ companies across aviation, aerospace, defense, energy, automotive, and robotics. ION sits at the center of the modern factory, connecting design engineers, production lines, quality teams, inventory, and purchasing into a single source of truth.

For First Resonance's customers, integrations are not optional. ION has to connect into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools, Quality Management Systems (QMS), and the rest of the factory data stack to deliver its full value.

Before Prismatic, getting those connections in place was the slowest part of every new customer engagement.

"Time to value is really critical, and what we found was that with integrations, it's a critical source of value. Our customers depended on those integrations, bringing the data from those other systems into our software to get full value," explained Ben Bloom, Vice President of Manufacturing Success at First Resonance. "However, as soon as we start on the onboarding journey, we have to hit this breakpoint and say, 'Wait, we need to integrate. We need to do some more discovery. We have to build these out for you.'"

That breakpoint became a source of friction for every new customer launch. The moment a contract was signed, momentum stalled. For a young manufacturing software company that depended on a strong new logo engine to fuel growth, slowing down right after the signature posed a real risk to renewals and full product adoption.

The search for a better way

"Without Prismatic, we depended on third-party integration providers to build out custom connectors, to do a lot of the backend integration work that we are doing in-house now," Ben said. "Those have their place in some places, but when it comes to getting a simple, seamless integration out, Prismatic is clearly the better choice."

Internally, the picture was not much better. Integration work was treated as "side projects from within the engineering team" rather than a core responsibility, which pulled engineers away from product development and capped the pace at which new connectors could ship.

The result was a process that scaled in exactly the wrong direction. As First Resonance's sales team brought in new logos, the onboarding team had to grow linearly to keep up with the demand for integrations.

"You want a process that scales non-linearly, so as you add more customers, you don't linearly add the number of people you need for onboarding, but we found ourselves moving in the opposite direction," Ben said. "We don't want to slow down the sales process because we need to triage and wait for onboarding specialists to become available. We want to keep up with the speed of the business."

There was also a quieter, longer-term problem on the customer side. Customers without strong in-house engineering could not unlock the full power of ION on their own. "Prior to having these workflow builders, our customers' ability to automate and build on top of ION, our software, depended on their in-house technical abilities," Ben said. "For customers that didn't have a lot of that in-house experience or for teams within our customers that weren't software developers, we found that there's a big consumption gap in terms of the capabilities of our software versus what they were using, simply because they didn't have the in-house expertise to build out those capabilities."

First Resonance needed an integration platform that could remove those bottlenecks across the board: one that could serve both its internal engineering team and its end customers, scale across an exponentially growing customer base, and meet the security requirements of the regulated industries they sell into, including defense and government customers running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud.

Why Prismatic won

When First Resonance evaluated Prismatic, what stood out was the dual value: a platform purpose-built for both internal developers and external customers.

"It's a platform that works internally and externally for us. It's reduced friction on the customer side significantly, as I described that integration process," Ben said. "Pulling in those different systems, connecting all the different data systems, is very complex, but customers just want it to work."

For First Resonance's engineers, Prismatic provided foundational infrastructure (authentication, deployment, monitoring, logging, and scaling) so the team could iterate quickly without having to rebuild integration plumbing from scratch each time. And Prismatic's embedded tools opened up a path for customer teams to build their own automations directly inside ION, even without a developer on staff.

"Internally, allowing our engineers to focus on the design, the output, the capability, the system architecture, and having a tool that allows them to iterate really quickly, build something that's very maintainable and extensible across the customer base," Ben said. "Prismatic checked all those boxes off in terms of the value for our external customers, as well as the enablement of our internal engineering teams to be more effective."

The implementation: a platform for both teams

Once Prismatic was embedded inside ION, two things shifted in parallel. First Resonance's engineering team could ship native integrations on Prismatic's infrastructure instead of routing the work to outside consultants. And customer teams that a lack of in-house technical talent had previously prevented from building their own automations could now build them directly inside ION.

"The reaction was pretty tangible, especially with the customers that didn't have those in-house capabilities, but were interested in unlocking that functionality inside our software," Ben said. "What's been really powerful from a customer success perspective is working with our customers and seeing them demonstrate the automations that they built using the embedded workflow builder."

The use cases came from every corner of the factory.

"It's everything from a manufacturing engineer that built a data connector that they just needed but didn't have and didn't want to go pay a third party to build for them, to an intern that built a whole data pipeline for their finance team," Ben said. "It was a project that they had on the backlog for a long time, and they had an intern that was working on it as a project and was able to build this great automation using embedded workflow builder, specifically for the finance team, without having to touch any of their production or manufacturing systems."

For Ben, the intern story is the one that captures what changed. A workflow that had been stalled in the backlog for months shipped in days, in a safe sandbox, by someone who two years ago would have had no path to ship anything inside ION at all. The customer's finance team got the data pipeline they needed. The intern received recognition for delivering more than was asked of them. And First Resonance got proof that its integration strategy was working without consuming engineering bandwidth on either side.

"Knowing that we've enabled that through our partnership with Prismatic and embedding that into our product itself," Ben said, "it's really cool to see the embedded workflow builder being the heart and soul kind of behind those capabilities."

The results: 550+ instances and $300K in annual savings

The shift to Prismatic produced a measurable, immediate impact across First Resonance's business.

$250,000 to $300,000 in direct annual cost reduction

By bringing integration work in-house onto Prismatic, First Resonance eliminated a substantial chunk of the third-party consulting spend it had previously absorbed.

"We've just, out-of-the-gate, reduced those integration costs by 250 to 300K annually," Ben said. "For a company of our size, that's significant."

Integrations at scale across 80+ manufacturing customers

First Resonance now runs more than 550 integration instances across more than 80 manufacturing customers, all powered by Prismatic and all managed from a single platform. Replicable, embedded integrations replaced the artisan, customer-by-customer approach that previously gated every onboarding.

Faster onboarding and lower support load

The shift collapsed time-to-value during onboarding and reduced the volume of integration-related escalations after launch.

"Having a much more seamless way to do that, where a lot of the existing integrations are already available, we've been able to replicate the stuff that we've built and replicate that across customers, has lowered that barrier to entry and made our time to value a lot shorter so that customers are getting value sooner after contract signature," Ben said. "Huge value for us, huge remover of friction for our customers, and generally just higher satisfaction through that onboarding process."

He added: "Integrations are a decreasing component of friction between us and our customers."

The strategic impact: why integrations make manufacturing customers stickier

For First Resonance, integrations are not a feature checkbox. They are a core source of stickiness because they let customers focus on what they are actually in business to do: build hard things.

"Customers, our customers are not in the business of integrating software. They're in the business of manufacturing really cool, innovative things, and to enable them to do that, they need all the software, all the systems to just work," Ben said. "It removes it from the things that they need to be concerned about and allows them to go focus on their core business function, which is manufacturing and innovation in the manufacturing space."

He compared the experience to removing a thorn. "It wasn't about the thorn, it was about, 'Hey, I just need to clear this pain point so I can go do the thing.' Removing that pain point is a huge source of value, and it's one less thing that we need our customers to worry about, so they can go worry about the stuff that they're really trying to do for their investors, build that next innovative product, bring that cool thing to market that they've been working on."

For an MES platform serving aerospace primes, defense manufacturers, and energy innovators, that reliability is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation customers depend on to ship audit-ready products in some of the most regulated industries on earth.

Looking forward: native connectors today, customer marketplace tomorrow