iCAST Engineering & Manufacturing:

Engineering and Manufacturing industries constantly combat daily production problems together with the complex and interlinked market factors that contribute to the need of a highly proactive and efficiently managed system to survive in the business.

Be it Purchasing, material supply, production, quality or finance - all areas need to be managed effectively to ensure that the overall targets are achieved. And more important is that there is a constant need to reduce the risk in multiple areas. With all their available data that cover operational and technical areas, Manufacturing organizations constantly strive to have a golden copy of their information on which they can base their decisions with certainty. It is not easy as it is not merely a data, but there is a position to every atom of data in their activities and a semantic interlinking for the same data in multiple departments. And Organizations do not need a reactive approach towards their management needs, rather a proactive approach.

iCAST provides them a solution to their problem. The product has industry models with pre-built content areas, providing a store of information built on domain specific 'Business Models' that benchmark against International Standards. Pre-built content aids multidimensional analysis and decision making. The solution optimizes the existing investment through benchmarking of the organizations' processes with over 1000+ metrics in Key Performance Areas. These provide the benchmark for gaining efficiency. Industry knowledge imbibed in the models of the product owe their origination to Organizations as Supply Chain Council, APQC etc.,.For example, in the SCM area, the complete set of SCOR metrics are available with the process interlinking, ability to be analyzed and acted upon. These things ensure that Organizations evolve to Global standards very easily. And with sophisticated technology, with appropriate patterns and trends, the decision enablement provided by the product enables a proactive approach, rather than a reactive approach.

Make your decisions with Confidence rather than Compromising with data based on silo of information. iCAST foundation based on decision sciences accelerate the right decision on right data at every possible situation (Urgency or ordinary) with 100% confidence. The cognitive computing in the solution makes the system adaptive and self learning based on the user patterns and business rules.

FINANCE

Finance is the backbone for the Organizations. Managing the finance effectively is the key to profitable and sustained market presence. As much as it is important to monitor and get receivables in regular time intervals, it is equally important to save money in operations there by ensuring funds are available correctly for any purpose like expansions. Manufacturing organizations will always need to have a eye, not only on the control of the cash for operations, but also on the funds locked up in areas like finished goods or items to be recycled.

It is not “What is happening?” that satisfies the decision makers. The most important thing is to have a clear idea on “What is the pattern?”, “Why is this pattern?” and how will the forecasts become effective and plans be closer to the real scenarios and there is effective control. Our Product ensures that all these requirements are effectively addressed and the users get the real visibility and confident decision making in the complex financial scenarios.And we empower you fully by providing

  • Correct information, right decision model on the information, 360° view of the measure through multiple dimensions and scenarios, actionable intelligence with proactive alerts, all together only can ensure that the financial performance is effectively managed.

  • Strategies linked up with metrics to get your financial scores seen directly with the trends that take into account your target setting pattern, industry bench marks and actual performance.

  • Scorecards and metrics linked up with multiple financial strategies to see the conflicting items, balancing items etc.,.

  • The behavior of the business scenario better with multi-dimensional dashboards that points out to the contributing/inhibiting factors for measures with clarity.

  • Business alerts in your mobile, E-Mail or through the system when some financial measures’ trends go bad.

  • Any analysis, the way your brain wants - linking up any dimensions to facts dynamically to arrive at any kind of mapping and co-relations.

SCM

In a highly interconnected and competitive Supply Chain Environment, Engineering and Manufacturing companies see a great stress. The right insight into the cost, reliability, order fulfillment, distribution logistics, procurement and inventory level, the agility and the Quality aspects help the organizations to save huge money. The money saved in SCM operations is directly available unlike the sales. Releasing the locked up working capital in inventory enables the Organizations to use it for productive purposes. The organizations need to have a unified view of the working capital together with the operations targets and actual across all processes, so that the over-all purpose of increasing the profits is fully achieved.

And the SCM risks pose a greater challenge which is one critical factor that Organizations constantly have a eye on, but still that is an area that demands a lot of maturity and refined understanding of the external and internal environment. Enterprises need to look into lots of areas with deeper insight in multiple areas where activities are taken up parallel with individual deadlines and targets.

The needs of performance management is complex and there needs to be a sophisticated technology with data and decision sciences that enable the Organizations to achieve a effective performance management.

We satisfy your needs . We provide a solution that gives you a complete link up from strategies till score cards - this linked up to the complete dimensional analysis - all threaded with the process mapping, thus ensuring that you are enabled fully to effectively manage a complex system that carries too much information across a chain that starts from procurement till sales dispatch. Collaboration feature ensures a closer working environment towards achieving a common goal. And Alerts ensure proactive control. All these based on SCOR & other Industry standards, that enabling you to evolve quickly to the global standards.

Marketing

Manufacturing Organizations are always driven by a need to have a right insight into the market needs together with customer preferences and purchasing ability . Taking into account the variety and value of inventory available ready for sale, higher the clarity on markets and customer preferences, lesser is the risk of sales opportunity or mishandling of the selling activity.

Organizations face heavy competitions and business cycles are 3-7 times lesser. Unless there is a clear understanding of the market preferences, customer preferences, sales trends with the targets set, Channel Eco system etc., survival in markets become tough. If order fulfillment or material quality is not satisfying, retention of customers become a problem. Money spent on marketing efforts will have to reap benefits within a reasonable time span. Otherwise it just becomes a lost effort with money spent. Building the right brand image, positioning to the right customers, having a highly satisfied customer group etc., are very important towards a successful market presence. Market always throw up opportunities some of which are obvious, some are hidden. To have a successful market presence or be a market leader , it is very important to have complete visibility as well as control on the marketing activities.

Few of the challenges that Sales and Marketing departments in Organizations have been facing include

  • Need for increased operational efficiency and accuracy by avoiding error-prone, spreadsheet-based processes with disjoint data, reduction of overpayments,shortening sales cycle times,optimization at every sub process of the sales and marketing activity, growth with opportinities by getting on-time and accurate analysis, trends and alerts to take pro-active steps.

  • Pressure to reduce risks to have a safe sustenance in Markets

  • Need for evolving go-to-market models to be competitive

  • Respond quickly to changing marketplace dynamics .

  • Deploy more-sophisticated sales coverage models.

  • Imperative to drive sales channel effectiveness by ensuring performance at every point in the sales and marketing activities.

Sales

For any Manufacturing Industry , Sales activities become effective if their dynamic need of information is available timely and precisely - be it on market preferences, product feature acceptability, demand areas, order availability , Sales expansion, pipeline behavior , etc.,.

With deeper insights on markets and buying patterns, the opportunities are understood better and utilized. Availability of right facts enables the sales force to reach their sales targets effectively. Without the understanding of the micro segmentation of the markets& customers and the buying trends of the same from multiple perspectives, "selling " never becomes realistic. Proper understanding of multiple sales parameters ensure proper target setting. Otherwise sales targets themselves become either too ambitious or too low. In highly competitive market scenarios, having a longer pipeline conversion time, greater customer churn and losing out on opportunities,- even though seemingly not problematic , many a times lead to greater losses. And green market pastures are not readily available, it has to be retained and nurtured with proper sales operations and order fulfillment. And for this right information is very much needed.

Our product does empower sales operations all these aspects. The product links the complete sales metrics with the sales strategies seamlessly till complete analysis on the same . The enablement of interlinking the metrics not alone with the targets, but also with the benchmarks and tolerance limits ensure a tighter control. The availability of collaboration with all these ensure that there are coordinated efforts towards getting the sales performance effectively managed and operations handled with maturity and made more effective with minimal efforts.

Customer Insight

Given the complex environment in which manufacturing organizations operate, deep insights into their customer behavior , their pattern of buying and their preferences ensure that Organizations are able to mitigate the market risks. Having the right insight into the customer segments enable the companies to address the right segment, retain the customers, and expand into the right segments of customers very quickly. Best understanding of the Customer profiles enable the Organizations to predict the behavior of the markets, sales ability, Customer retention ability , time to market and time for market expansions. It also gives them the right hit ratio. Towards this Organizations need a much focused approach which is what the product enables the Organizations for.

Given the dynamic changes in the market, the product gives the Customer Insight with needed agility and preciseness with a clear mapping with the market understanding, markets, plans, plan enablement, forecasts, actual sales, channel framework they have and so on. This ensures that their understanding on customer Insight is full and mapped to all influencing dimensions. Thus the clarity that the product gives result in tangible outcomes in revenue/profits

The complete interlinking from the strategies for customers & markets with metrics, KPIS, customer management goals give a unified view that ensures that Organizations are able to map and retain their right customer profiles fully and properly. The metrics seamlessly interlink with the dash boards to get the "Why?" of things. The enablement of collaboration & event driven alerts ensures that not only the customer insight facts give the details; the market initiatives become matured with an actionable intelligence.

Empower yourself with the technology from leaders proving you a process driven BI which ensures that the story of the data is understood through the flow so that there is a correct and semantic understanding of the data as well as the scenarios without any data interpretations at multiple levels differently.