David Scott, CIO at Premier Manufacturing Corp. in Cleveland, saw a chance to save US$150,000 annually by automating a data collection process that had been done manually. But Scott"s decision did significantly more than that: The shop-floor monitoring system, known as FactoryMRI, also increased manufacturing capacity by 7 percent and labor efficiencies by an estimated 15 percent while reducing annual setup costs by $130,000 and defects by 50 percent.

"We"re saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually with this," Scott says. "It"s paid for itself already."

Premier Manufacturing, which fabricates wire products, employs about 500 people at three U.S. locations. Its production workers had tracked information on paper, writing down what they did, the time it took, the volume produced and other information. Another dozen or so people handled these production cards -- hundreds of them every day -- using them to analyze production information and calculate workers" incentive-based pay.

"As any CIO is supposed to do, I looked at it and saw that it was wasteful," Scott says, adding that he initially calculated that the company spent $3,000 a week just to handle those cards.

So in 1999, Scott decided to automate the process. When he didn"t find any off-the-shelf technology products, he teamed up with Progress Software Corp. in Bedford, Mass., to develop, deploy, integrate and manage an application. Premier Manufacturing spent about $800,000 on the project, which was implemented within nine months, Scott says.

The company continues to add features and see benefits. In addition to collecting production data of all sorts, the system can even help detect when production workers are fatigued, Scott says, based on their performance rates.

"We keep finding new analyses, reports and tools we can do with this," Scott says. "So for the past four or five years, it"s been a continuous improvement path we"ve been on."