Lighthammer strikes commanding pose at user conference

Greg Gorbach of Dedham, Mass.-based ARC Advisory Group says Lighthammer is "doing a lot of things right." This was abundantly evident at the collaborative manufacturing software vendor's second user conference, held mid-September in Philadelphia. There, 200 attendees—twice last year's number—heard presentations from customers Dow Corning, Whirlpool, Colgate, and Proctor & Gamble on gains made from its software in the last year.

In fact, just a year ago, Dow reported on its pilot project with Lighthammer's two flagship products: Illuminator, a digital dashboard that provides a common view of all enterprise data, coupled with graphic analytics and key performance indicators; and Xacute, a workflow-based execution engine that enables rapid creation of "composite applications" that model custom business processes using data gathered by Illuminator. In the intervening year, Dow has gone from a single-site, single-application pilot to a companywide rollout with more than 100 user-requested composite applications in place, driving greater enterprisewide operational excellence in 22 plants and more dollars to the bottom line.

Keith Carey, senior information delivery specialist at Dow, says his company gained tenfold productivity with the Lighthammer Collaborative Manufacturing Suite in terms of the number of composite applications it was able to rapidly deliver. "ROI was so compelling on paper that we signed an enterprisewide license," he says. Carey anticipates tenfold ROI by year's end.

"The basic concept [behind the Lighthammer suite] is to gather up information from wherever it is in the enterprise and offer it in the form of services to users," Gorbach says. Lighthammer, founded in 1998, gambled on the then largely untested Web services architecture in designing what it envisioned as an application for getting disparate data from across the enterprise into a single window, and then performing the consolidated analytics a user deemed valuable.

Illuminator was the "morning coffee"—i.e., the critical operational performance view that a person would ideally first want to see when coming into work. The vision and its execution have been impressive, with annual average growth in revenues upwards of 200 percent since the product was released. With the release of Xacute last year—which, when coupled with Illuminator, created what Lighthammer calls "the industry's first Operational Excellence Platform"—revenues climbed 320 percent.

In addition to customer success stories, Lighthammer was eager to showcase its partnership with enterprise vendor SAPat the user conference. The two companies recently extended the partnership, whereby Lighthammer now provides universal manufacturing application integration in support of SAP's adaptive manufacturing strategy. Nearly 80 percent of Lighthammer's 250 customers use SAP.

Says Sudipta Bhattacharya, SAP's VP of manufacturing solutions, "Having access to information on the plant floor in real time enables SAP to do what we do more effectively." This goes to the heart of SAP's adaptive manufacturing strategy, to provide manufacturers with "the ability to respond to exceptions in the supply chain."

The power of composite applications is the foundation of Lighthammer's thrust in achieving manufacturing operational excellence. "The fundamental premise of composite applications is speed of deployment," says Rick Bullotta, Lighthammer cofounder and chief technology officer. "Our strategy is based on the idea that users leverage what they already have, fill the gaps, frustrate the competition, and accomplish results rapidly."