ant award write up

2017 European MES for Food & Beverage Price/Performance Value Leadership Award

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© Frost & Sullivan 2017 2 “We Accelerate Growth”

Contents

Background and Company Performance ........................................................................ 3

Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 3

Price/Performance Attributes and Customer Impact .................................................. 3

Conclusion........................................................................................................... 5

Significance of Price/Performance Value Leadership ........................................................ 6

Understanding Price/Performance Value Leadership ........................................................ 6

Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 7

Best Practices Award Analysis for ANT Sp z o. o. ............................................................ 7

Decision Support Scorecard ................................................................................... 7

Price/Performance Attributes ................................................................................. 8

Customer Impact ................................................................................................. 8

Decision Support Matrix ........................................................................................ 9

The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 10

Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 10

About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 10



Background and Company Performance

Industry Challenges

A manufacturing executing system (MES) is a product scheduling and product/service

tracking solution that is used to analyze and determine resource availability and status. It

is also used for collecting comprehensive factory floor data such as raw-material and labor

usage, process attributes, equipment status, and other vital information. In general, MES

in the food and beverage (F&B) sector is adopted in all manufacturing plants that process

livestock and agricultural products into goods for instant or final consumption. Yet the

varied operations in the F&B industry increase the level of difficulty for implementing MES

solutions, as this step causes major disruptions to existing operations, so customers

typically choose to proceed with existing frameworks, especially in established verticals.

This conservative mind-set pervades the industry and has long been a restraining factor

for wide-scale implementation of MESs.

The adoption of MES solutions includes tangible (i.e., licensing and infrastructure) and

intangible (i.e., training) costs. That said, small and medium scale enterprise (SME)

customers often face capital challenges, as MES implementation involves considerable

investments. SME customers, moreover, lack exposure to the extended value proposition

of an MES solution, thereby hampering the wide-spread adoption of MES solutions in the

F&B industry.

Price/Performance Attributes and Customer Impact

Functionality

Poland-based ANT Sp. z o. o. (ANT) has developed a holistic MES solution, called ANT

Smart Production, which supervises order flow—from creation of a new production order

through stocking the finished goods in warehouses. ANT’s customer-centric approach

enables end users to monitor and analyze every instance of downtime (including micro

downtimes) that occurs on the production floor. The ANT Smart Production solution allows

the operator to access precise and complete information such as the point where the

downtime occurred, duration of the downtime, and asset utilization. One of the

differentiating factors is that, by implementing ANT’s MES solution, end users can bypass

operators’ settings, as the MES can be seamlessly integrated with a company’s ERP

(enterprise resource planning) software. Such enhanced product functionality has enabled

ANT to boost its customer acquisition in the F&B industry.

Product/Service Quality

ANT focuses on offering a best-in-class service experience to customers by ensuring

provision of client-friendly professional help from the time of order initiation through the

technical-support phase post implementation. ANT works as a partner with its customers,

and the relationship starts with a factory visit in order to determine the scope of MES

implementation. After the defining stage, ANT suggests the best methodology for solution

implementation followed by conceptualization of the preliminary project plan.



ANT’s engineers and technicians are highly experienced in the implementation of

automation systems. Their range of expertise includes:

Drawing up the concept details as per customer requirements

Configuring and launching software products

Testing software

Training the customers’ staff and operators

Offering round-the-clock technical support

Performance Reliability

In the industrial software solutions space, end users expect software products to function

as advertised and marketed by the manufacturer; however, ANT has gone a step beyond

with its proven record of exceeding customer expectations. F&B customers expect a

potential return on investment (ROI) while implementing an MES solution and robust

product features. ANT, as a leading provider of industrial software solutions, is extremely

conservative in terms of issuing and fulfilling promises concerning its products’

functionality. To illustrate a best practice example: A leading producer of bottled water,

based in Poland, wanted to enhance production efficiency and hence implemented ANT’s

Factory Portal software. By adopting ANT’s solution, the production system is now able to

automatically collect and archive crucial production data. This data is further processed

into vital information which is sent to the end user for production line effectiveness. A

unique feature of this solution is its preciseness, that is, the end user will also receive data

about production losses, split into filling-area losses and packing-area losses. Thus, ANT’s

solution has enabled its customer to increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and

take full control of the production line processes.

Customer Ownership Experience

End users’ ownership experience can be best appreciated by first understanding ANT’s

perspective on the role of MES, downtime monitoring systems, production reporting, KPI

monitoring, energy consumption, and maintenance systems for the F&B industry of the

future. In particular, ANT focusses on providing a high degree of satisfaction amongst its

existing and potential customers, which is achieved by the following strategies:

Software solutions are tailor-made by taking into account the technology used on

the factory floor and the company’s possibilities.

MES solution is automated and does not require operators to enter data.

Easy access via Web browsers and user-friendly dashboards enable employees and

managers to view the operations.

As MES can be integrated with ERP, manual documents are replaced with error-

free reports that are generated automatically.



Price Value

Since 2006, ANT has focused on software solutions that help its customers grow the

business efficiency of production processes. In real time, ANT’s software helps in analyzing

and presenting production progress, slowdown and breakdown reasons, actual OEE, and

other benchmarks. Furthermore, ANT offers software solutions for supporting maintenance

processes (including predictive maintenance), in-process and post-process quality control,

and advanced statistical analysis. ANT’s product portfolio also includes software for

supporting many types of continued improvement initiatives and projects, offering real-

time process data acquisition, on-line data, and benchmark presentations. Time and

again, ANT’s system implementations have afforded spectacular effects, especially in high

volume and fast production processes like food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and

cosmetics, and tobacco, as well as in automotive and airplane parts production where not

only maximum speed of production is important but also raw materials and process

control parameters are crucial (traceability). As the final effect of ANT’s system

implementation, customers have achieved double-digit improvement in the percentage

growth of productivity.

Brand Equity

ANT is a respected brand in the industrial software solutions market and is renowned in

Poland for providing innovative products and aftermarket solutions for its customers in a

timely manner. While the company has an extensive international presence with sales

offices and subsidiaries across 24 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, it

is particularly strong in the Polish market; this can be best exemplified by the fact that

ANT has implemented over 350 system solutions in the past 10 years.

Conclusion

ANT is a leading provider of real-time software solutions for industrial customers in the

European region. The company’s unique MES solution, the ANT Smart Production,

connects functionalities such as production processes, traceability, and maintenance with

the management team, thereby enabling customers to lower production losses, increase

production output, monitor energy usage, supervise machines and operators, and

eventually boost revenue income. Frost & Sullivan’s analysis clearly shows that ANT has a

proven history of providing its best-in-class solution to F&B customers, including a bottled

water filling monitoring system, sugar filling machine monitoring, efficiency analysis, and

a beer filling monitoring system.

For its strong overall performance, ANT Sp. z o. o. has earned Frost & Sullivan’s 2017

Price/Performance Value Leadership Award.



Significance of Price/Performance Value Leadership

Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon customers purchasing from a

company and then making the decision to return time and again. A full, comprehensive

product line that addresses numerous customer needs and preferences is, therefore, a

critical ingredient to any company’s long-term retention efforts. To achieve these dual

goals (customer value and product line strength), an organization must be best-in-class in

three key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the

competition.

Understanding Price/Performance Value Leadership

As discussed above, driving demand, strengthening brand, and differentiating from the

competition all play a critical role in delivering unique value to customers. This three-fold

focus, however, must ideally be complemented by an equally rigorous focus on building a

superior and comprehensive product line.



Key Benchmarking Criteria

For the Price/Performance Value Leadership Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts

independently evaluated two key factors—Price/Performance Attributes and Customer

Impact—according to the criteria identified below.

Price/Performance Attributes

Criterion 1: Functionality

Criterion 2: Ease of Use

Criterion 3: Product/Service Quality

Criterion 4: Performance Reliability

Criterion 5: Prioritization of Features

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Best Practices Award Analysis for ANT Sp. z o. o.

Decision Support Scorecard

To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance

categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool

allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance, according to

the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that

basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation.

Ratings guidelines are illustrated below.

RATINGS GUIDELINES

The Decision Support Scorecard is organized by Price/Performance Attributes and

Customer Impact (i.e., these are the overarching categories for all 10 benchmarking

criteria; the definitions for each criterion are provided beneath the scorecard.). The

research team confirms the veracity of this weighted scorecard through sensitivity

analysis, which confirms that small changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not

lead to a significant change in the overall relative rankings of the companies.



The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the

interests of all organizations reviewed, Frost & Sullivan chooses to refer to the other key

participants as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3.

Measurement of 1–10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent)

Product Line Strategy

Product Line

Strength

Customer

Impact Average Rating

ANT Sp. z o. o. 9.5 9.0 9.25

Competitor 2 8.0 7.0 7.50

Competitor 3 7.0 7.5 7.25


Criterion 1: Functionality

Requirement: The product offers enhanced functionality to serve the broadest range of

applications

Criterion 2: Ease of Use

Requirement: Customers typically feel that the products are easy to use to generate

optimal performance

Criterion 3: Product/Service Quality

Requirement: Products or services offer the best quality for the price, compared to similar

offerings in the market

Criterion 4: Performance Reliability

Requirement: The product consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations for

performance over its life cycle

Criterion 5: Prioritization of Features

Requirement: The features that customers most value and expect are most commonly

available and most aggressively priced

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar

offerings in the market.

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Requirement: Customers feel they are buying the most optimal solution that addresses

both their unique needs and their unique constraints.

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service and have a

positive experience throughout the life of the product or service.



Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality.

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty.

Decision Support Matrix

Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard,

analysts then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to

visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at

best-in-class levels.

High

Low

Low High

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ANT Sp. z o. o.

Competitor 2

Competitor 3



The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best

Practices Awards

Research Methodology

Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research

methodology represents the analytical

rigor of our research process. It offers a

360-degree-view of industry challenges,

trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of

Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies.

Too often companies make important

growth decisions based on a narrow

understanding of their environment,

leading to errors of both omission and

commission. Successful growth strategies

are founded on a thorough understanding

of market, technical, economic, financial,

customer, best practices, and demographic

analyses. The integration of these research

disciplines into the 360-degree research

methodology provides an evaluation

platform for benchmarking industry

participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.

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