Datanomix recently raised a fresh round of capital to fuel commercialization and further development of their Fusion software product. In the interview below they talk about their product launch, success to date, and plans for the future.
Q: Congratulations on your funding, that’s big news! Tell us about the business to date and what successes you are having with your early customers?
John:
We are pleased with the response we received from both our new and existing investors. This is a nice vote of confidence for the value that Fusion Factor is bringing to our customers. Investors have been extremely supportive through the process and continue to assist us in improving every aspect of our business, from product design to product support and expansion. This new funding will be used to expand our sales and marketing teams with a strong focus on North American customer growth.
Greg:
With Fusion Factor fully released and ready to deploy, we are winning accounts at an increasing rate. Our ability to deliver a real-time production score to the entire organization has taken us to a whole new level of sophistication in data analytics and improved information flow and closed the time gap between questions and answers. This plug-and-play technology has people getting information about production that they never had access to before. Gone are the days where you are chasing yesterday’s answers tomorrow. Manufacturers exploring analytics solutions want quick and painless victories, and Fusion delivers on that promise.
Q: This real-time production scoring concept sounds very interesting, how did it come to be?
Greg:
Our engineering team was very deliberate in setting design guidelines that minimized operator input, got the story straight from the machine, and kept pertinent information always within a click or two. When you start with parameters that are so focused delivering value to the end user, you have a beacon that guides you to maximize positive impact. Add to that rapid development cycles and close proximity to users during our pilot program, and you have all the right ingredients for meaningful innovation.
We constantly get comments about how slick and simple our user interface is. We also wanted to deliver a shop floor experience that is like none other. We took some inspiration from sports analytics to do this. OEE and MES systems were the first chapter in learning about what’s happening on the production floor - that’s sort of the box score, it tells you what happened after the fact, not quite when you can do something about it, and not quite with enough context to know what to do.
Real-time production scoring is about putting you in a position to improve the day in progress, with very clear guidance as to what and why.
John:
I can't emphasize enough the value of real-time production scoring - it becomes the new way to work. The outcomes are rapid and the uptake is dramatic. We get to know operations leaders and production supervisors within these facilities, and they beg us to deploy in their area first as we scale across the entire site.
Q: What does the future hold for Datanomix and for your Fusion platform specifically?
John:
On the product, this is just the beginning for Fusion software. We have focused very much on job-specific productivity and have had excellent results doing that. Without tipping our hand too much, let’s just say knowing the score at the job level is step one, but there are many more places this real-time scoring concept can be applied going forward. We’re excited to share that with our customers in the very near future.
On the business side, rapid customer expansion. We have already won some great accounts in the Midwest - Michigan, Ohio Valley, Pittsburgh area - and will continue to do so. Our roots are in New England, so we’ll always have focus and growth here. We are seeing great demand in the strong manufacturing geographies across the U.S.for our product.
Greg:
It's an exciting time - the team is expanding, the coffee budget is going up, we started a tradition of folks bringing in homemade soup on Wednesdays - you can feel the culture, the product and the opportunity all aligning nicely. It's incumbent upon us now to keep making happy customers, keep listening, and keep innovating.