Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/594816
38 SMT Magazine • November 2015 ers end up engaging with us. We have our base reporting and analytics module, which is what most people associate with Portus, as op- posed to some optional modules that people sign up with afterwards. I'll first focus on the general model. We have two price points. You can either get your feet wet with a three-user license—that's three concurrent users, so you could potentially have more users, but three of them can be logged in at any one time for $1,500 a month. Then you can get a site license, meaning unlimited users, unlimited logins, for $5,000 a month. It all depends on how quickly you think you're going to be running reports. Our experi- ence is that once Portus is installed, it becomes the de facto reporting and analytics engine and it's being used all over the place, and then peo- ple graduate to the site model. What's very key here, because we have a lot of pride in terms of utility, is that there is no big up-front investment, and we always offer a 30- day free trial because we believe the customer needs to see Portus not just in a demo setting, but actually with their own data, so they can say, "Wow, I could actually use this right now and it would improve my life," before they sign up. Af - ter that, it's sold on a month-to-month subscrip- tion basis, so it needs to be adding value every month, and we're very confident that it will. We just want the customers to know that we don't want them to take any undue risk or make a large up-front investment. That was an- other one of my pet peeves when I was on the other side: people selling software based on a demo and asking for a huge up-front invest- ment without having validated that it would, in fact, add the promised value. There's no way you can assess everything in a short assessment period, so we sell it on a subscription basis with the ability to cancel at any time. With the optional modules we have a cus- tomer portal, a buyer's workbench, an MRP sim- ulation engine, etc. Those are discussions you have with customers after they've been using Portus for awhile, and those have a lot of differ- ent arms and legs in terms of the pricing. Matties: it sounds like there's little or no risk to try it. the value should be almost instant because b ut very near and dear to our hearts and goes along with the fact that we're manufacturers at heart, and we are purpose-built. It's been built by people who have been consumers of these re- ports. I have been reviewing accounts receivable information on a regular basis, and have devel- oped a set of best practices of what I've seen. Interestingly, that's a great example when you talk about it being open to interpretation. I would be willing to bet that in 99% of the com- panies in the United States, anybody doing an accounts receivable review is looking at how much of the accounts receivable is current, and then looking at it in pass-through buckets. It's such a mainstay of how you analyze accounts receivable, and here comes the big inefficiency, right? You've got all of these customers devot- ing time, effort and resources to build these ac- counts receivable reports, which probably fun- damentally look the same. Maybe there's one that looks the best, and the best situation would be if all of them just use that rather than each developing it themselves, and that is, in a mi- crocosm, what we are all about. Matties: What's the price point for a package? how do you price this? Moradkhan: There are a lot of variables, and there's an evolution to the way that custom- ImProvING ProDUCTIoN eFFICIeNCIeS WITH beTTer DATA STrATeGIeS FeaTure INTervIeW