Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/594816
November 2015 • SMT Magazine 35 other companies, like them, to drive their busi- ness every day. There's that confidence that, "Hey, I'm using reports, and I'm using a solu- tion that's tested and being used in production settings, and it's plug-and-play for me." Matties: is your system modifiable, where they can customize the reports that they want based on the information that's there? Moradkhan: You can answer that question yes or no. There are lots of manipulations you can do. "Oh, I want to see this by customer. No, I want to see this by part number. I want to drill into this aspect. No, I want to drill into that aspect." In that sense, it's very interactive, and each user is using the system a different way. Having said that, all of the reports are built by Portus. The base reports with all of their options and func - tions are built by us. You focus on your business, we build it. Not only that, when you first start you get hundreds, maybe thousands of reports immediately from the time that you install it, so you save the time of having to develop it yourself. Sometimes customers will have needs that go beyond what is currently reported, or an op- tion in Portus. In this case, we start using the creative juices of our customers to improve re- sults. If the request is something that is clearly going to be useful to the entire community, this is what we call the "community effect." Then we take the creative juice of Customer A, and build a new functionality. Customer A is happy, but now Customer B is pleasantly surprised, be- cause they just got some new functionality that they didn't have previously. If the request is very specific to a customer and involves their own customizations of the system beyond how customers normally use that system, then we may do that as a profes- sional services project for them. Then again, it'll become available to other people to the ex- tent that they use the data the same way. Matties: how long has portus been in existence and what's your background? Moradkhan: We just celebrated our fifth year. I come from a complete manufacturing back- ground. That's why I can be very evangelistic about this, because my 20 years of manufactur- ing experience has shown me that most people never actually get to the point where they're managing the business. Most of the time, they're just chasing data. That was my biggest pet peeve when I was in executive positions in manufacturing companies. We ended up, as part of my last stint, at a company called Pro- Works in Santa Clara, developing it ourselves because we got tired of this. A lot of the ad- vanced functionality became our inspiration, because I know that people struggle with this everywhere. I know that we weren't alone. What we used to tell people back then and is still true now is, "If you're the company that's building the next great medical device or the next great telecommunications device, how much time should you be spending on devel- oping, maintaining and deploying reports?" My answer to that is, "At the limit, none. You should be focused on your products and how to make them better, rather than having a sig- nificant amount of internal resources looking at reporting. That should be done automatically." Matties: so your system is all online. is their data online? is that the idea? Moradkhan: The kinds of data that we are que- rying and presenting is often sensitive data, so our deployment model is very respectful of that. What we do, even though you use a browser like Google Chrome or Internet Explorer or Ap- ple Safari, is deploy our system inside the cus- tomer's network. A user is going into a browser, but from a server perspective they're not going into the World Wide Web. They're going to a local server resource. That way, all of that data is remaining inside our customer's firewall. The added benefit of that, because our ap- plication is sitting on the same network as the data, is that response time is very fast. People are always shocked by how fast the reports render themselves, and we look for it to be a real Web experience. I mean, it needs to be like you're on Yahoo or Amazon. Nobody likes to wait for minutes for a link to upload. Matties: now, in terms of the data, you're also talking about reduction in cycle time. that's a big ImProvING ProDUCTIoN eFFICIeNCIeS WITH beTTer DATA STrATeGIeS FeaTure INTervIeW