The FINANCIAL — Informance International, one of the leaders in manufacturing business and enterprise manufacturing intelligence solutions, announced on March 8 that Unilever (NYSE: UL) (NYSE: UN), one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies, has chosen to expand the deployment of the Informance software solution across all of its plants in the Americas.
According to press-release distributed by Marketwire, the deployment is part of Unilever's Total Productive Maintenance program (TPM) aimed at enhancing manufacturing performance in efficiency and quality across the region.
The move toward a standardized approach to drive and sustain manufacturing operations performance is the next chapter in the long-time relationship between Unilever and Informance. Unilever's expansion into additional plants, including those in the ice cream business, brings to 21 the number of plants utilizing this technology and includes Informance's software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosted solution. The system and software allows manufacturers to leverage real-time performance intelligence in order to assess improvement opportunities, align plant tactics with corporate strategies, and exercise the most efficient use of the information to sustain the effects of operational excellence activities.
According to Terry Herber, Mgr. Supply Chain Capabilities Americas of Unilever, "Informance allows us to apply TPM loss elimination principles across our plants. For many years, we have used Informance in plants to tackle OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). We now have visibility of this information regardless of where you sit and can help replicate the improvement gains across multiple factories."
Consumer goods manufacturers are constantly looking at improving efficiencies across their supply chains. Global manufacturers report that simple OEE tools are not adequate to drive the improvement agenda, and leading manufacturers look to solutions that deliver facts, pervasive visibility, and maximum knowledge transfer, along with real-time data to drive their efficiency and optimization plans.
"We are proud to partner with Unilever to help them achieve their performance goals," comments Sunil Singh, CEO of Informance. "It's not just about helping them advance their operational excellence initiative, but further enabling them to quantify and report the financial impact of improvements, and to contribute to financial performance through those actions that will have the greatest impact with the least investment."
Informance is already a leading provider of Manufacturing Intelligence solutions, leading the market in offering Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) Software as A Services (SaaS) subscription solutions. "This on-site hosted model has enormous benefits for Unilever for deploying on a regional scale," said John Oskin, Executive Vice President of Informance. "Informance Advisory Services, coupled with a quick deployment model, will enable us to accelerate the impact on their operations."
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