by Ashley Prazych
Washington, Pennsylvania based Amtech Software, a leading global provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Customer Resource Management (CRM) solutions for the packaging and labels industry, hosted the 2026 Amtech User Conference in Nashville, Tennessee in October.
With more than 240 customers in attendance, the conference was rife with discussion, hands-on workshops and demonstrations, and keynote addresses from Amtech executives, CEO Chuck Schneider and Senior VP of Product, Danna Nelson.
Amtech Software CEO, Chuck Schneider, delivered the opening keynote address at the 2026 Amtech User Conference.
Schneider set the tone for the conference in his opening keynote, where he introduced this year’s theme: Compete Smarter, Operate Stronger. Over the course of his presentation, Schneider shared a roadmap of Amtech’s strategy to help box plants win more work (Compete Smarter) and drive better performance on the plant floor (Operate Stronger).
The Difference A Year Makes
Since its last user conference in 2024, Amtech Software has grown its global team and restructured the support teams to be product-aligned. In addition to bolstering its knowledge library, these moves have helped Amtech achieve significant results:
The size of the company has doubled, jumping from 111 employees last year to 202 this year
Response time has seen a 78 percent improvement; now 3.6 hours, down from 16.6 hours in 2024
Non-defect resolution has become more efficient. These cases now close in 7.1 days, down from 14.5 in 2024, a 51 percent improvement
New knowledge articles are continually being added to the Amtech database, resulting in 1:7 issues resolving without a user needing to open a case
In July of 2025, Amtech was acquired by Vista Equity Partners, a large private equity firm focused solely on investing in enterprise software. With over 90 companies in its portfolio and about $100 billion in assets, Vista operates through smart investment and capabilities that were a good fit for Amtech’s ambitious growth goals – to be a global “household” name in packaging software.
Over 240 Amtech Software users filled the Platinum Ballroom at the Sheraton Grand in downtown Nashville.
“Vista believes that when you want to scale a company globally, you should have multiple development centers so you can support customers in other regions,” said Scneider. “They helped us choose Bangalore, India for our second development center. Within the next two to three years, the company aims to evolve the India team into a strategic global center. This will include increasing ownership of global initiatives across its flagship platforms EnCore, Label Traxx, and Axiom.”
Amtech has entered a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier this year as well, which will be instrumental in bringing packaging technologies to the cloud, as described later in this article. Partner representatives were onsite at the user conference to provide demos and answer questions.
Building The Team
To deliver on his ambitious vision for Amtech, Schneider knew he needed an expert team in place. When asked about his approach to constructing his “dream team,” he said, “I’m a big believer of getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats. In my first 90 days with Amtech, my top priority was to get a feel for how our employees view the company. I had 30-minute meetings with each employee at Amtech and I asked the same two questions: One, tell me about the culture at Amtech – how do you view the company? And two, if you could wave a magic wand and change three things about the company and make it better, what would they be?
“I tracked all the answers, which helped me figure out who’s in the right seat, who’s in the wrong seat, and where we have issues. Then, I started to search for somebody to run the product division, and somebody to run our own customer operations group.”
Danna Nelson
Enter Danna Nelson, whose work style aligned perfectly with what Amtech was looking for to grow the product division. She shared, “Transformational work is my favorite kind of work. If a company is just looking for someone to manage it and keep things status quo, I’m probably not the best person for that role. I was inspired by Amtech’s vision for the future of the company, and I was eager to hit the ground running.”
Then, Schneider recalled, “I needed a senior marketing person. We were doing so much cool stuff, but I didn’t feel like we were getting the message out as well as we could. Our goal is to become a household name, so we brought Courtney Pierce on in January 2026 as our Senior VP of Marketing, and she’s been doing amazing work.”
Pierce shared, “I’ve spent over 20 years in working for technology companies who specialize in workforce automation and transportation and logistics. With my background in the CPG space, I was excited and intrigued by the industry and the technology Amtech was developing. Once I met Chuck and Danna and the rest of the team, it was a done deal.”
Additional updates to the executive team include Vinod Kumar, Chief People and Culture Officer; Kostas Vassilakis, Senior VP of Technology; Cory King, Senior VP of Customer Operations; Darren Artillio, Senior VP of Sales; and Joe Buckley, who acts as Schneider’s chief of staff and product manager.
Growing Support And Services
Amtech has invested in its support services by adding additional team members and restructuring the service teams into products-specific pods for more effective and knowledgeable support.
Schneider expressed that there are several KPIs Amtech is focused on to improve the user support experience. The first is response time. The length of time it’s taken for Amtech to respond to an issue has gone from two days two years ago, to under four hours today. That’s a roughly 78 percent reduction. Second is non-defect cases – the ones where you just need to know how something works.
“We’ve driven that down 51 percent, going from about two weeks to close a case to about a week,” said Schneider. “When a case gets closed, if it’s a case that may affect other users, a knowledge base article is created. Now, when a user goes to open a case, they will first be presented with knowledge base articles that could potentially solve the problem. This adjustment to the system has resulted in about one in seven cases being resolved without ever needing to create a case.”
Courtney Pierce
This quarter, Amtech is also launching a new tool called Ask Amtech, a powerful AI-based tool that lives inside of our support portal to help our customers enter cases. It can solve cases end to end and can provide real time status of open cases. And if it can’t figure out how to solve a case, it will escalate to a person.
Follow the Sun coverage will also launch in 2027. Under this offering, open cases unresolved by the end of the day in the U.S. will transition case to our Bangalore support office. That team works on it overnight and transitions it back the next day. “Having that continuity and focus on those cases will allow us to solve cases much quicker,” Schneider said.
Investing In Product Development
“I think everything we’ve been doing has been our collective vision and our vision is to be the global leader in AI-powered software solutions for the packaging industry,” said Nelson. “For that to happen, we need to continually invest in our software. This year, we spent about 29 percent of our revenue on research and development. For context, a typical software company does about half of that. We’re 100 percent focused on packaging, and this has played out as Vista searches for companies that would be a good fit for Amtech from an M&A perspective. Unless those other companies have a packaging focus as well, they won’t work for us. It’s this deep focus that will continue to differentiate us.”
In May of 2026, Amtech acquired Clarico Systems, the pioneering provider of AI-powered estimating and quoting software for the packaging industry. Clarico’s capabilities complement and extend Amtech Intelligence: AI embedded into the workflows that corrugated, folding carton, label, and flexible packaging companies rely on to profitably serve their customers. Amtech Intelligence activates existing business data into decisions, actions, and better outcomes to transform how packaging manufacturers plan, quote, produce, and optimize their operations.
Amtech Intelligence is the strategy for how Amtech products become more intelligent. The first product that falls into this category is Amtech Quick Quote, an AI tool that streamlines estimating and costing, and is completely integrated into EnCore.
“We also have a SaaS offering for EnCore now, which is different than what we’ve offered before with managed services hosting,” said Schneider. “The Encore SaaS offering is hosted at AWS. We’ve spent a lot of time working with them on that. Our first customers are actually in the configuration stage right now, and they should go live next month. And this is truly a SaaS offering, where we take care of everything from the get go. You never have to worry about us coming back and saying, hey, you have to find more hardware.”
Schneider went on to share Amtech’s three big bets that will help deliver on the company mission to be global leader in AI-powered software solutions for the packaging industry.
Big Bet Number One: Going All In On AI
When we start getting into true AI capabilities, the first thing we think about is machine learning, which is when the software uses historical data to learn, get smarter, and make better decisions going forward.
Machine learning has been around for a while. In fact, as Schneider shared in his keynote, he graduated with a Master of Computer Science in 1990, and he completed his thesis on AI, and it was all about machine learning. Now, Amtech implements this type of AI via the Advanced Planning Board, which learns from past orders to produce a better production plan for the ones ahead.
Generative AI is software that can understand a question and generate a useful answer, in plain language, on demand. An example of that in the Amtech world is EnCore Cora, which provides assistance within the context of what you’re working on in EnCore.
From a value standpoint, agentic AI is at the top of the food chain. An agentic AI tool doesn’t only answer questions for you, but it can take independent action based on what it learns. Amtech Quick Quote uses agentic AI to automate manual, everyday plant work. Amtech has remained firm on its view on agentic AI, which is that there should always be a human in the loop to make judgment.
Big Bet Number Two: MES Solution
The next big bet centers around Amtech’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) solution. Schneider introduced an automotive analogy to support this idea: “MESla – a combination of MES and Tesla – is Amtech’s internal name for the strategy around how we’re going to take its MES solution to the next level (Note: MESla is not the product name).
It was a sales meeting with a potential customer that inspired the MESla strategy.
Schneider explained, “Your MES is a Ford and my MES is a Chevy. Both get me where I need to go, they both look good, and they’re both reliable. Maybe your Ford’s a little bit faster, but if you really want me to make a switch, don’t give me another Ford. Give me a Tesla.
“Today, MES, whether it’s ours or competitors, is about optimizing equipment. We’re going to expand equipment performance to plant performance. We’ll combine data from your equipment, your plant-specific processes, and your operators into one platform called Team Performance, an AI-powered platform that takes real-time MES and ERP intelligence and translates it into frontline actions to operators on the floor.”
An example of this tool in action: You’ve done a quote and won the job, and that quote was predicated on the machine running at a certain speed. As long as that machine runs at that speed, everything is good. But if you start running below that speed, there’s a risk of that order being late, which will cost more money. Team Performance comes in to recognize that the machine is running too slow and give everyone on the team a notification of the problem so it can be resolved quickly, rather than realizing at the end of that job that there was an issue.
“We really believe that focusing not just on equipment, but the plant optimization is what really is going to be that step change in our MES.” Schneider said.
Big Bet Number Three: Enabling Growth With The Cloud
The third big bet Amtech Software is making is on the cloud.
“Vista will claim they’ve helped more companies migrate their products to cloud than any other private equity firm,” said Schneider. “They’ve got 90 companies doing enterprise software that all come together and share best practices. So, when there’s a problem we’re trying to solve, we can go back to the Vista team and find out how other companies are solving similar problems.”
Several customers have shared that on-premise deployment is limiting their growth. How? Schneider explained, “As your company grows, typically you’ll eventually need to add new hardware, more memory, and you’d hire more IT people. When your servers are on-premise, they inherently become attached to your growth. The cloud simplifies this process by eliminating these extra steps, so all you’d need to do as your company grows is to add a user to the cloud.”
The second thing to consider is security. Ransomware is now the number one operational threat facing packaging manufacturers. On-premise servers running aging operating systems are no longer just an IT concern, they are a business continuity risk. Manufacturing ransomware incidents have increased 56–61 percent, and the average ransom demand has exceeded $1.2 million.
Being in the cloud can mitigate that risk. This is where AWS comes in. The investments they make in security enable Amtech to provide a much more secure data environment than any individual plant could do on its own.
Schneider shared about the approach, “We’re building up a team to do this. Theo Peterson, our VP of Infrastructure and Security, has a team of over a dozen people already that are supporting our cloud migration.”
The team is comprised of three groups – the system designers who work with AWS, engineers who monitor and maintain the systems to provide Follow the Sun support, and the security team, who is looking out for security incidents 24/7. Amtech is investing a lot in its journey to the cloud.
Making The Roadmap A Reality
By the time the next Amtech user conference comes around in two years, much of what Schneider laid out in Nashville will have moved from roadmap to reality. It’s an ambitious vision, from AI and cloud technology to expanded global capabilities and a new approach to plant performance, but through all of that growth, Amtech remains clear about who it is building for. And as Schneider affirmed throughout the week, “We’re still 100 percent focused on packaging.”
