Emcien Selected for Follow-on NSF Grant
“With a growing number of features and options, and shorter product lifecycles, companies are being proliferated to death,” explained Roy Marsten, Emcien’s Chief Scientist. “ This proliferation costs companies 18 to 25 percent product margin. Companies need a sustainable solution to manage and monitor this proliferation on a continuous basis – Emcien delivers that solution.”
Emcien, Inc. has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support development and commercialization of techniques to address the challenges due to product complexity.
Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) August 16, 2006 -- “With a growing number of features and options, and shorter product lifecycles, companies are being proliferated to death,” explained Roy Marsten, Emcien’s Chief Scientist. “ This proliferation costs companies 18 to 25 percent product margin. Companies need a sustainable solution to manage and monitor this proliferation on a continuous basis – Emcien delivers that solution.”
Emcien, Inc. has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support development and commercialization of techniques to address the challenges due to product complexity.
Emcien was awarded the grant through NSF’s Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation, which helps improve the competitiveness of the country’s manufacturing base. Emcien’s solutions have already resulted in millions of dollars of material cost reduction for automotive and heavy machinery companies. The NSF grant will help to further Emcien’s research and support the commercialization of additional modules.
The trend toward mass customization to meet customer demands has created a complex issue that manufacturing companies must address to remain competitive, notes Robert Springfield, a manufacturing specialist at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program.
“Mass customization and the unrelenting competitive pressure to increase customer-selected features and options is an enormous problem for manufacturing companies,” he said. “The complexity of large-scale customization results in raw material and finished goods inventory imbalances, order fulfillment problems and disruptions in supply chain. Emcien’s optimization technology deals with the core issue of what combinations of features and options will yield the best results.”
Springfield says more traditional approaches to the optimization problem strive only to improve the business processes that support mass customization.
"Building the right product configurations to meet customer needs is essential to competing in today’s marketplace," Marsten added.
“Companies do not build Model T’s. To survive in the global market, manufacturing companies need solutions that can help manage their product variety, and react efficiently to changing feature/option demand,” he said. “We are honored that the NSF recognizes the importance of our mission to help manufacturing companies be more competitive.”
About Emcien, Inc.
Emcien, Inc. is a pioneer in researching product complexity reduction and its impact on manufacturing companies. Emcien’s roster of blue-chip clients has demonstrated that reducing complexity can unlock the tied up capital of your operations and the margin potential of your products. Emcien’s proven software solutions are built on patent-pending optimization technology based on more than ten years of leading-edge research and industry partnerships started at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Emcien is a privately held company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and can be reached at www.emcien.com.
Emcien Contact - Media Relations
404.920.1990
404.385.6092 /fax
About the National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5.47 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 40,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes about 11,000 new funding awards.
About the ATDC
Georgia Institute of Technology’s Advanced Technology Development Center is a nationally recognized science and technology incubator that helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies, providing strategic business advice and connecting its member companies to the people and resources they need to succeed. More than 100 companies have emerged from the ATDC, including publicly traded firms such as MindSpring Enterprises – now part of EarthLink.
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