LANDMARK BENCHMARK STUDY REVEALS IMPORTANT INSIGHT FOR MANUFACTURING PERFORMANCE IN FOOD & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES

Enterprise manufacturing intelligence data used to uncover strategies of top performing companies.

REDWOOD CITY, CA — February 20, 2007 — High performance food and beverage manufacturers outpace their peers in operational metrics such as asset utilization, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and operational availability, according to a report published by Informance International, a leader in Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI). The recent study of 141 worldwide food and beverage packaging lines uncovered substantial gaps in performance between manufacturers that have granular, real-time visibility and measurement of key metrics versus those that do not.

The five-month study revealed that best-in-class enterprises outpace laggard performers in:

• Asset utilization by 246%,
• Overall equipment effectiveness by 150%, and
• Operational availability by 125%

Furthermore, laggard performers lose 21.12% of overall capacity to unknown causes, compared to less than ½% for best-in-class manufacturers.

"This study is unique because it was conducted using five months of real-time manufacturing performance data aggregated using Informance’s Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence platform," comments John Oskin, Founder and Executive Vice President of Informance International. "The highly granular and rich real-time nature of EMI information brings a new dimension for external and internal benchmarking initiatives."

Key findings of the Informance benchmark study show that:

• Typical plants in the food and beverage industry average over 87,000 “short duration” line interruptions per year.
  
  
• Top manufacturers incur only 1% of line rate losses also known as Cycle Erosion™ compared to 16% for laggard performers.
  
  
• Best-in-class companies outpace laggards in three key loss areas –shutdown, changeover and process failures.

The food and beverage benchmark study is the first in a series of reports that Informance will publish this year. Others will include pharmaceutical, consumer goods and industrial products. The EMI firm will update each report twice annually.

To read the executive summary of this report, visit www.Informance.com/FoodPack.