On the eleventh day of X-Mas
my blogger gave to me
another vendor hyping,
blog posts worth keeping,
spend vendors lancing,
thoughts for a shilling,
strategies for winning,
tactics for saving,
five golden rings,
four little words,
tri-focal lens,
two boxing gloves,
and a lesson in strategy.

Allow me to introduce you to Informance. A provider of Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) solutions, Informance delivers software and advisory services purporting to enable enterprises to achieve a higher level of supply chain performance with real time visibility and valuable insights into manufacturing operations by addressing the following business areas:

• Global Visibility
• Inventory and Replenishment Management
• Production Efficiency and Cost Reduction
• Revenue Growth and Capital Investments

These areas are addressed as follows:

Global Visibility

Customizable Performance Dashboard that consolidates information from all global manufacturing facilities and provides real-time information for every product line, down to the factory and individual factor assets.

Inventory and Replenishment Management

A software solution with built-in formulas to allow you to optimally balance cycle time, production efficiency, and production variability from an inventory viewpoint.

Production Efficiency and Cost Reduction

An analysis engine that allows data spanning multiple plants, product lines, and asset types to be analyzed individually and comparatively to allow the discovery of cost-saving transformational improvement opportunities.

Revenue Growth and Capital Investments

The Informance solution tracks utilization levels across the plant network in real time, allowing for real-time order reallocation to insure best usage of capacity and minimal lag time.

The informance platform is designed to support Lean Manufacturing and all that it encompasses, including Total Productive Maintenance, Kaizen, Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED)/Quick Changeover, and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Now, we all know that Lean (Manufacturing) has been around for a while, and that companies have been selling Lean (Manufacturing) solutions since it has been around, so you’re probably wondering what’s innovative about a company like Informance, especially when lean (manufacturing) is so passé.

Well, even after meeting their CEO earlier in the fall on one of my recent Bay Area trips, I wondered too – but then they simultaneously attracted some of the best marketing and sales talent in the space, including Sudy Bharadwaj, of recent Aberdeen fame, so I took another look – and the answer is simple – usability. Most lean solutions don’t give you enterprise wide visibility, and fewer still are useable. Plus, the new sales, marketing, and business development teams are in the process of revamping Informance’s offerings to make them even more useable and more effective in an average deployment. I know you’re asking what? Why? After all, sales and marketing and business development at most companies exists for the sole purpose of determining how much money can be sucked out of a customer. But you have to understand the caliber and foresightedness of the team that Informance has pulled together. They understand that the best way to make money is to sell a solution that a customer wants – and that’s a solution that solves a problem. Sell them silicon snake oil, and you’ll never sell to them again. Sell them a solution that actually works, and they’ll keep coming back for new and better solutions and services.

So watch out for Informance in the coming year – I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about them.