Leading manufacturers remain at the forefront of their industry thanks to an ability to make key business decisions quickly and accurately, based on all the necessary information available through realtime intelligence.
In a bid to help such players remain as industry leaders by ensuring that they retain the competitive advantage such intelligence provides, Citect has launched Meta, a benchmarking and analysis service allowing managers to benchmark a balanced range of production and other key performance indicators (KPIs) across plants, divisions and countries, thereby leveraging best practices and improving capital allocation throughout the organisation.
According to Kurt Lovell, global director for Meta, this realtime benchmarking allows users to either make comparisons between different plants within the same organisation, or to perform external benchmarking, where the comparison is confidentially made to similar industry players.
"It is only by identifying the industry performance bar that one can really try to raise the bar, and as long as you are comparing like to like and using similar KPIs, industry benchmarking allows your organisation the chance to see whether it is leading the pack, lagging behind or in line with the rest of the industry," he says
"Obviously there is a confidentiality issue to manage, but we are very careful not to identify clients in any way to other users during the benchmarking process, and naturally the information is secured from hackers and similar criminals through the use of leading edge technology and encryption capabilities."
Lovell says that Meta is a hosted application, so Citect takes care of all the hardware and software infrastructure needs, providing clients with a Web service where they can interact with the site, set their own criteria and have the necessary results communicated back to them.
He also points out that although the industry benchmarking service is described as being 'realtime', this is only to the extent of Citect being able to vet the benchmark information first before presenting the data to the customer, as it would not do to give the client the wrong information - accuracy is paramount.
"Meta provides data more on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis and is aimed at CEOs, COOs and CIOs and the like - the type of people whose business decisions are based on the trends they see, rather than those taken immediately and on the shop floor by managers. Simply put, Meta provides a macro-view, rather than a micro-view," he says.
"Meta can serve as an acceleration tool for the organisation. As if a CEO has access to the right info at the right time, he can make the informed, correct decisions, and that is why it is aimed at those who require a view over more than one operational site and thus have an interest in comparing one such site to another. We are talking about strategic business decisions here, such as where to invest capital, which sites to automate, or when should one divest from an operation."
Lovell says that Meta is designed to be extremely easy to use, claiming that as long as you are comfortable with a mouse, you will be able to use the solution, although Citect will always provide any training that is required.
"The tough part for the user is for them to be able to understand what information they want to benchmark and where the data to support this is going to come from, but once they know this, using the actual solution is simple, as it mostly involves clicking the mouse, although we do have support if it is needed. The idea has been to make Meta simple enough to use that the client should be fine on their own with very little support from their own IT/IS departments."
Asked which industries are most likely to utilise a service like Meta, Lovell says that this is both the opportunity and challenge for Citect, as almost everything can be benchmarked, and most key players want to have some sort of benchmarking done.
"Our first focus will be on the water industry, since there are a variety of environmental pressures and government regulations driving this sector, as well as there being less ambiguity around the KPIs that are being measured, as these are set by government."
"We will also be looking into the energy arena - measuring power usage, the cost of energy and so on - and this in turn will take us into the arena of corporate sites, manufacturing industries and the like, so it is something that will open other doors for Meta in the future whilst providing immediate value to Citect's existing and potential customer base."
Lovell says that, relative to the information generated by it and the help it can offer to a decision-maker, Meta is very reasonably priced, using a per-user price model at present, although he points out that the company is reviewing a number of different pricing options, as it wants to create as few barriers to entry here as possible.
"Meta's aim is to be a simple, focused and easy-to-use tool that combined with the external, third party view that we provide, is useful to organisations, because it provides an impartial insight into data that may otherwise not have the impact it should, simply because the user sees it every day," he concludes.
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