CloudNOW, the executive consortium for the leading women in cloud and converging technologies, announced the winners of the eighth annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards today, including Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, Instrumental’s CEO. This is the first time a manufacturing-focused organization has made the prestigious list, representing a larger shift in the manufacturing market away from on-premises systems and towards technologies that leverage the connectivity of the cloud to provide value that wasn’t possible before.
In an industry where 20 to 35 cents on the dollar is wasted on unnecessary inefficiencies like scrap, rework, returns, mistakes, experiments, and downtime – Instrumental’s vision is to provide technology that enables brands and manufacturers to cut that number in half by closing feedback loops in their supply chains. The faster (and larger) these feedback loops can be, the less waste that is created in the manufacturing process.
The core differentiator for Instrumental is the scale of the vision: instead of focusing on one factory partner, Instrumental works with brands to instrument their entire supply chains – enabling them to be sensitive to issues that originate from anywhere in the process. Traditional on-premises data systems cannot collect a broad dataset across multiple geographical sites – meaning that issues that originate upstream are often not visible until it’s weeks too late. For multi-vendor supply chains that span multiple geographic locations (which is almost all of them), Instrumental leverages cloud technology to provide traceability, data, and the insights engineers need to drive manufacturing metrics in real-time.
A quick example comes from Instrumental’s work with Motorola, where engineer David Platner used Instrumental to identify a tooling issue on an upstream component. Throughout 2019, an increasing number of Instrumental customers have seen the advantage of collecting product data from throughout the supply chain, extending Instrumental from their final assembly factories into upstream suppliers.
Anna-Katrina is honored to be recognized for the work Instrumental is doing to innovate in the manufacturing space. She shares, “the real prize is what cloud technology enables for Instrumental customers: a real-time understanding of their product and process that results in faster time to market, higher quality, and less waste.”
Here’s a link to the full press release.
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