OutPerformance

AmericanMachinist Production Speeds Lead to Profit
A U.S. steel manufacturer serving the automotive, construction and appliance markets needed to improve profits and its return on assets and wanted to accomplish the task by incorporating production speeds for each product.

Article Archive

	Maximizing Return on Assets Since signing up for a Web-based subscription service from Maxager, Owens-Illinois has dramatically improved its visibility into profitability in its glass container-making business.
	AK Steel Implement Maxager to Enhance Profits Maxager, the leading provider of enterprise profit optimization (EPO) solutions, today announced that AK Steel, one of North America's premier steel producers, has successfully implemented Maxager for its hot-dipped galvanized product line to assist the steelmaker in analyzing margin potential for its various product offerings.
	Dollars Per Minute Maxager 7.5 lets executives get granular when it comes to Profit Velocity™, telling them which products produce profits fastest.
	Enterprise Profit Optimization Delivered via a SaaS Model Wheeling-Pitt Steel (WPS) review of Maxager that appeared in the July 2007 issue of DM Review. The review discusses how the company is using a "profit-per-minute" approach to ensure that daily decisions are optimizing corporate profits and return on assets (ROA).
	Applying “Lean” to the Financial Side of Manufacturing Moving from a margin-only approach to a profit-per-minute one enables ROA to be used as an operational metric, thereby applying the principles of “lean” to the financial side of manufacturing and achieving the goal of optimal corporate profitability. Such an approach can typically increase profits worth 3-5% of revenue.
	Maxager Helps Chemical Companies Degussa And Millennium Improve Profitability Maxager, provider of velocity-driven enterprise profit optimization solutions, recently announced new chemical industry customers: Degussa (www.degussa.com) and Millennium (www.millenniumchem.com). Rather than viewing profitability with the traditional "margin only" approach, Maxager combines production speed data with margin to generate a profit-per-minute metric. Being time-based, this metric is directly linked to annual earnings and return on assets (ROA) and its use typically offers chemicals and other manufacturers the opportunity to increase in profits worth 3-5% of revenue.
	Many Operational Metrics Do Not Optimize Corporate Profitability - Survey Many manufacturers believe that it is important to measure the speed at which products are made, but very few have systems in place to do so, according to the results of a new survey conducted by Maxager Technology.
	Off the Spreadsheet & Into the Plant WCI Steel has become able to compare product lines down to individual items on an apples-to-apples basis using software from Maxager Technology Inc. (San Rafael, CA). WCI Steel, an integrated flat-rolled steel manufacturer based in Warren, OH, produces 1.3 million tons of steel a year, with revenues of $860 million. David A. Howard, vice president commercial, says the company started with Maxager in September 2005 "to increase our visibility over item profitability." The company produces thousands of discrete items in 15 product lines but could only analyze one or two items at a time and had no visibility into customer profitability beyond local knowledge.
	Preview: Maxager 7.3 Analysis System Most analytic software is designed to address the palette of business challenges operations and finance must collaborate on. These products' have a broad direction, trying to address as many issues as possible. Maxager Technology's Maxager 7.3 analysis system, however, targets a specific range of challenging problems head-on with a sharp focus and an original point of view aimed at squeezing an extra 3 to 5 percent of profit out of the production capacity.
	Shareholders Pay for ROA -- Then Why Are We Still Living in a Margin-Only World? ROA is perhaps the premier metric of quarterly and annual results. But how many manufacturing firms are able to measure and report on ROA at the transactional level of detail? How many provide their middle-management ranks with accurate, timely, detailed reporting of ROA by invoice line item, production run, customer order, production line, etc.? Virtually none.
	Redefining Manufacturing Productivity How much further can U.S. manufacturers push productivity gains? After more than two decades of continual and impressive improvements, are manufacturers finally beginning to see diminishing returns from the tools and techniques that have delivered world-beating productivity gains in the past? Or are the opportunities for boosting productivity as wide open as ever? In other words, how close to the productivity summit have U.S. manufacturers climbed?