SaaS downstream: Informance unveils on-demand manufacturing intelligence suites

MBT Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/3/2007

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement has made its way to the factory floor—or at least to the desktops of managers and executives responsible for monitoring plant performance.
Informance International, a supplier of enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) software, has released three on-demand versions of its system, which supports the gathering and analysis of production-related data.

Informance On Demand is a Web-resident version of the Informance business intelligence (BI) platform. The platform includes a data warehouse that aggregates data from all systems and plants within a production network. Users—including production managers and company executives—can conduct multidimensional analysis on the data to identify issues that are affecting operational performance. The Informance platform contains automatic problem-alerting capabilities, and can integrate with ERP, MES, and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems.
Informance currently offers the following versions of its on-demand solution:
• Plant Edition for process manufacturing to increase performance of multistage, batch process operations;
• Plant Edition for discrete manufacturing to increase performance of discrete and packaging operations; and
• Enterprise Edition for executives of manufacturing companies to benchmark and track performance of plants and the network against corporate strategy.

"We are pleased to offer a choice for customers who want to minimize the burden on internal resources yet take advantage of manufacturing intelligence and performance analytics," comments Sunil Singh, CEO and president of Informance International. "Companies now have the option to quickly improve operating efficiencies without having to worry about deployment time frame and resources to install software.”