INFORMANCE INTRODUCES ENTERPRISE SOLUTION TO ACCELERATE OPERATING PERFORMANCE INITIATIVES

Manufacturing firms can now align executive strategies and operational tactics enterprise-wide.

REDWOOD CITY, CA — January 10, 2007 — Informance International, a leader in Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) solutions, announces the release of The Informance Enterprise Solution for manufacturing companies eager to accelerate improvement initiatives, drive operating strategies and obtain actionable insight for operational performance. Informance is the only EMI solutions provider that delivers the top three critical capabilities as prescribed by leading analysts to drive better business decisions: multi-site performance analysis, enterprise visibility of production financial performance and data aggregation from multiple plant facilities.

"The Informance EMI solution helps us drive operational excellence across our entire enterprise by providing global visibility into our manufacturing operations," comments Jim Heard, Assistant Vice President of the Cargill Salt business unit. "The combination of multi-site data aggregation and cross-plant analytics enables us to make strategic decisions better and faster, significantly accelerating and sustaining manufacturing performance."

Building on the success of The Informance Plant Solution, The Informance Enterprise Solution allows users — at the plant, operations management or executive level — to unlock capacity, increase productivity without additional capital investment, reduce inventory and labor costs, and decrease working capital. Informance Plant improves performance real-time while Informance Enterprise provides strategic intelligence. When used together, these solutions provide a holistic approach to leverage intelligence, and build and sustain continuous improvement initiatives.

Colin Masson of AMR Research comments that, "Enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) is a hot topic for manufacturers and now is the time to put all real-time operational data into business context. Informance is among those with an EMI framework that offers the broadest support of the core capabilities [first] defined in 2003, which we’ll continue to assess against the extended set of criteria."
Colin Masson & Alison Smith, "Architecting the Next Generation of EMI: Operations Intelligence Meets Business Intelligence," AMR Article, August 8, 2006, AMR Research Boston, MA; http://amrresearch.com/Content/View.asp?pmillid=19659.

The Informance Enterprise Solution contains two modules: Informance Manufacturing Strategist, and Informance Enterprise Alerts.

Informance Manufacturing Strategist enables:

• What-if scenario analysis. Evaluate strategies and the impact on KPIs based on real-time data from the manufacturing network. Operations teams and executives can now see the potential impact of decisions by facility and across the entire enterprise.
  
  
• Drive operating strategies. Executives can now translate a vision into strategies and day-to-day operating tactics throughout the manufacturing network. Intelligence travels both ways: from executives throughout the organization, and from individual assets within the manufacturing network up to executives.
  
  
• Closed-loop process improvement. The Informance Enterprise Solution monitors performance against targets in real time at many levels – all facilities, by plant, by asset or work center – so that strategies and plans stay on track.

• Proactive notifications. Management can receive warnings if the enterprise is in danger of missing any metric due to issues at any level – facility, asset or resource.
  
  
• Management by exception. Individuals and teams access a dashboard to manage issues globally from a single source.

For more information, please contact:
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