Another Trip
This week I'm in the Boston area. Had meetings with GE Fanuc and Invensys/Foxboro. The event that brought me up here was a media/analyst day at vision system supplier Cognex Corp.. That's tomorrow's meeting.
While I'm up here in Massachusetts, I thought I'd try to gather ideas on industry and technology trends from some managers in the area. One area that is interesting is the work GE Fanuc and Invensys are doing in the realm of improved financial metrics for their customers. Each has done empirical studies of financial metrics of its customers in aggregate and provided a detailed analysis for each. Each company has an approach unique from the other. GE Fanuc has compiled numbers from many companies in four areas of business and can provide customers with a view of what the average company at their stage of automation maturity obtains as financial results.
Meanwhile, Peter Martin at Invensys has done some extensive mathematical modeling based on his company's extensive research into financial metrics. Martin's focus is on driving real-time accounting (an oxymoron in a field that continues even today as a monthly cycle reporting model) based on real measurements from manufacturing.
The potential impact of both of these initiatives is to get manufacturing management to focus on business drivers and performance, not just the latest technology or "ancient" numbers.
7:39:01 PM 
|
