FactOn is the kind of company that I always expected to find in Germany. So here is the story. Two brothers, one is an accountant, the other is an engineer, both are working at Daimler-Chrysler. One is complaining about getting decent production cost estimates on new product designs and the other is describing what a pain it is to create these custom, and soon worthless, spreadsheets for every one of their new development projects. Ba-ding, light-bulb goes off, Dr. Hassno Plattner, who built a little company known as SAP, steps in with some funding and advice, and you have FactOn.
FactOn is purpose built for estimating the cost on things you build – mostly widgets or whatever for cars, lawn mowers, airplanes, etc – this manufacturing segment is known as discrete manufacturing. I was happy to dig into an hour + demo of the product. At first, it looks like a spreadsheet – or one of the many spreadsheet like budgeting planning tools, but then you drill into a product for costing and you see the good stuff.
Just to set the context of the review, I was an engineer undergraduate and was hired into Boeing right out of college. My first job there was building manufacturing systems for graphite epoxy production on the B2 bomber. So, what is the first thing a rookie engineer at Boeing does? Cost studies. You watch folks putting planes together with a stopwatch and a clipboard. Then, working with the aircraft designers, you put together detailed "Manufacturing Plans", pull out all of the cost data collected by you and all of your other rookie friends, and you build meticulous cost analytics reports – which get rolled up by hoards of accountants into the product costing of an airplane, or car, or backhoe, or other large device. So, what Facton's James Denman demonstrated to me, was exactly that, all online, doing in clicks what had taken us months.
Now, the German part. Drill through any one of the steps and you get details behind each machine, set-up processes, cycle times, maintenance allocation… there is a place for every detail. FactOn is working with a variety of data suppliers so that planners can start with the data already in FactOn. As data is developed for your own manufacturing process, FactOn also can make that available to the rest of your company or to your customers, for use in their own planning activities.
But, the benefits of FactOn do not stop at the creation of a cost estimate for a newly engineered part, that is only the beginning. FactOn allows you to collect manufacturing data and compare it to your estimates so that the actual cost, or the key cost impacts, can be evaluated and refined allowing very accurate costing of production runs. This ability to see and continually refine accurate costing in a discrete manufacturing company is often the difference between profit and loss. Effective cost management also allows more accurate pricing and a more competitive company overall. FactOn just opened an office in Detroit, Michigan, and you can sign-up for a free demo version of their solution.
Our Microsoft EBT focal in Germany, Carsten Rudolph, has been supporting FactOn in Germany. With their recent entry into the US, I am working with them now to get more global visibility. FactOn is a Microsoft application and has extensive integration with Excel. With the recent launch of Microsoft's PerformancePoint, there would be some natural integration scenarios, allowing a manufacturing company to see actual cost vs. originally forecast and refining the data to optimize both future development activities and current production runs. All in an easy to use online and Microsoft Office based environment.
