metasonic - next generation business software. engage. liberate. perform

www.metasonic.de

METASONICNEXT GENERATION BUSINESS SOFTWAREENGAGE. LIBERATE. PERFORM.

Authors: Stephan Sneed / Alexandra Kulfanová02.10.2013

POSITIONIERUNGSPAPIER

Metasonic - Positioning paper

Table of contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

METASONIC. NEXT GENERATION BUSINESS SOFTWARE ............................................................... 1

THE CHALLENGES OF TOMORROW ............................................................................................. 1

BUSINESS. IN TUNE. ................................................................................................................. 2

ENGAGE: EMPOWER YOUR PEOPLE ............................................................................................. 3

LIBERATE: ELIMINATE RESTRICTIONS ........................................................................................... 4

PERFORM: EVOLVE YOUR BUSINESS ............................................................................................ 5

Metasonic, the next generation business software, gives you the ideal set of tools for dynamic business activities. Their intuitive operation means that all users can design their workflows themselves and constantly adapt them. This results in tremendous commitment and frees up IT resources. With flexible modules, you can quickly create standardized, persona-lized solutions and even make repeated changes to them while they are running.

From the first live day, the solutions deliver the key performance indicators you need to help you grow your business on a controlled and continuous basis. The benefit for you: your employees are more dedicated, your organization is released from many restrictions and you can develop your business‘s potential faster and more effectively.

Prestigious companies such as Audi, NEC, Hitachi and Swisscom have already realized this and are successfully using Metasonic. Our customers are provided with support through our strong international network of partners.

Business. In Tune.www.metasonic.de

Metasonic. Next Generation Business Software.

We offer you next generation business software, which gives you the ability to conduct your highly agile business activities in a new way. With Metasonic, you allow your employees to participate more, free yourself from restrictions, and dynamically unleash your business potential. Metasonic: Engage. Liberate. Perform.


Page 1

BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE

IT PERSPECTIVE CEO PERSPECTIVE

With Metasonic, your IT department is transformed from a bottleneck into a catalyst for your business. You integrate business users into the system design phase more effectively than ever before and shift many of the changes over to the business division. The existing IT functionality is easy to manage and can be quickly recon-figured. Metasonic also brings together the strengths of standardization and customized development.

You can make existing standard software more flexible and quickly develop new solutions. All models are exe-cutable straight away and can be changed and extended without limit. Many of these changes can be made by the department itself without your input.

We supply you with the tool set you need to implement and adapt your business models quickly. Highly dedicated em-ployees and a freed-up IT department ensure the develop-ment of your company’s full potential. Your departments can create innovative IT solutions that allow you to quickly occupy new positions on the market. You can experiment with these solutions, revise and adapt them as often as you like, and analyze their performance. This is what helps you to stay the market leader.

With Metasonic, you can constantly optimize your opera-ting performance and rely on actual practical experience. You are also able to calculate future options and risks using the parameters you gain right at the start.

With Metasonic, you can easily de-scribe your processes yourself. This enables you to immediately utilize the resulting IT support and change it again as needed. You can coordinate your processes easily with your colleagues, exchange information and create the software solutions you need. Our me-thods are child’s play and our concepts are simple. This will encourage you to give completely new possibilities a try now and then.

In other words: We give you more than enough space to develop ideas for new, innovative solutions, which you can implement immediately. You quickly get a sense of achievement and the opportunities to make adjust-ments are endless. All this makesMetasonic your tool of choice.

Metasonic: Engage. Liberate. Perform.


Page 2

The challenges of tomorrow

Our world grows smaller every day. Integration and connectivity continue to steadily increase. This results in an ever increasing num-ber of options at your company as well. However, the vast number of possibilities also creates a vast number of new dependencies and risks. Natural phenomena or social and political developments in far-away places can be just as critical as the competitor in your own backyard. The size of the company no longer plays much of a role. The number of events and changes that you and your com-pany have to keep an eye on is constantly increasing.

At the same time, as the rate of change increases the time you have to react continues to decrease. Information is disseminated more and more quickly due to increased connectivity. As a result, product and business model life cycles are growing shorter. So you not only need to keep a close eye on more and more issues, but you also need to act ever more quickly.

This can make you feel like you are being torn in different directions. The increasing number of actions and reactions in an increasingly shorter time frame can no longer be managed through the rigid means and methods of the past. You can only ensure the company‘s sustainability by finding the right balance between control and flexibility.

Business. In Tune.Flexibility without losing control – how does that work?

With a well-coordinated organization that has sufficient agility in the right places and yet still stays on beat. This means that everyone has the chance to participate fully without endangering the harmony of the collaborative effort. This is the only way you can present a unified front and work successfully with your customers and partners.

It is like in the music world, where the rhythm and harmony of different sounds from various instruments come together to make music. We only perceive the sounds as music when the melodies come together and everything has the same rhythm.

Are you capable of enthusing your customers with “diverse melodies“? Are your employees extremely dedicated and not miss any of their cues? Is your company loose enough to improvise quickly yet harmoniously when it needs to? Are you able to prepare the right melody or the next solo while keeping the company on beat? And can you achieve all of this with the necessary ease?

With Metasonic, you can implement these requirements more effectively and therefore repeatedly inspire your audience.


Page 3

Engage: Empower your people

The entire range of sounds only develops when everyone gives their all. You have great potential in your company in the form of specialized knowledge and expertise. But are all your employees participating fully? And if not, why not?

If you could listen to the after-work conversations of your staff, you‘d probably dis-cover the following: Your people themselves think that they are unable to participate fully and that many of their ideas and potentials are simply ignored or overlooked. In all probability, your employees blame this on things such as an “inflexible” IT de-partment or an “excessively rigid” organization. But what are the reasons behind this perception and how can you engage your employees even more effectively?

Only a few employees in your company have a complete overview of all the interde-pendencies and are able to understand the interdisciplinary relations. Everyone else has only fragmented information or only speaks the language of their field. This can lead to communication problems and misunderstandings.

This problem is worse if IT is involved, because very few people understand the con-straints of information technology. Moreover, IT-supported solutions require a lot of work and money. Once they have been developed, solutions are very difficult to change and any kind of involvement in business processes therefore becomes a per-sonal risk. This is just as off-putting as long and detailed planning phases with the goal of minimizing these risks.

With Metasonic, you are able to take a different path. Each employee can shape their own processes with imaginative methods. Applications that are developed this way can be easily changed, expanded and readjusted at any time and as often as you like. The complex relationships and constraints of IT can be easily and intuitively presen-ted, allowing each of your employees to simply try something out and be happily involved.

THE STAFF PERSPEC-TIVE:

Do you have a new idea or need new or different IT sup-port because your market sit- uation has changed?

Previously, you have always passed on your requirements to IT. The IT department cre-ates concepts which you then need to check. But you‘re not a computer expert, and com-plex notations and process models mean little to you. What‘s more, the everyday running of the business leaves you precious little time. As a result, the specification of ex-pensive solutions remains a difficult and risky business for you.

Since later changes by IT are often only implemented slowly, you may find the sup-port you need being slightly lacking, often holding your ideas and suggested improve-ments back.

”With the tool we have used so far, we were able to seek out and check measures, but it wasn‘t possible to then implement them directly. When our momentum faltered at this stage, the people responsible found their motivation started to dwindle. With Metasonic, employees in the various departments are now able to understand the models and implement them directly.

As a result, everyone can get involved in making suggestions for im-provements and implement them on the spot.”

Shioi Emi,Department of Production Planning,Manager for Team Amalgamation,Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Co.


Page 4

Liberate: Eliminate restrictions

The attraction of music lies in its combination of fixed components such as rhythm and harmony on the one hand and sound and freedom of interpretation on the other. Finding the right combination of freedom and obligation is a complex problem for every company.

IT has a crucial role to play in this. Ideally, all commercial information should pass through central IT. Only that way can they provide you with reliable KPIs as a sol- id basis for decision-making. It is then also possible to implement compliance and governance effectively and efficiently via IT. Added to these binding requirements is now the demand for superlative flexibility.

The departments‘ many and constantly changing individual wishes present an IT depart-ment with its biggest challenges in terms of staffing. Customized developments are just as corrupted as a result of many changes as highly modified standard software. The amount of work involved with maintenance and changes increases exponentially. The IT resour-ces required for this are never available in sufficient number, whatever the company‘s size. Standardization, i.e. one-size-fits-all software, appears to be the panacea.

However inadequately adapted standard software or rigid process templates restrict the de-partment, and as a result the number of options available to your company. Ultimately, the department often helps itself with its own “solutions“. However, this is done without gov-ernance, compliance or KPI management, which only central IT can model efficiently and ef-fectively.

With Metasonic, you have intelligently constructed standard building blocks with which you can develop customized applications. These solutions are very flexible and can be changed and expanded as often as you like. With the help of compliance and governance, you can provide key performance indicators from the very beginning for reliable planning. Even large and numerous applications remain controllable via the isolation principle, which allows you to modify subsections of the system that are separated from other areas through clearly defined interfaces. Metasonic helps you make existing functionality within standard soft-ware or legacy systems more flexible and thus use it in a more targeted manner. Metasonic frees you from unnecessary restrictions and turns your IT department from a bottleneck into a catalyst for business.

THE IT PERSPECTIVE:

With its restricted resources, your IT department is already at the limits of its capabilities. It is becoming increasingly dif-ficult to meet the constantly growing demands of the de-partments in real time.

This forces you to rely on re-source-protecting standardi-zation even though you know that standard modules and process templates restrict the department.

But regardless of whether you use limiting standardiza-tion options or are unable to handle the maintenance of countless customized solu-tions: You are never able to satisfy every wish based on your already stretched re-sources. Even though you and your colleagues are doing all you can, your department is being perceived increasingly as a bottleneck.

“I didn’t think there was any tool such simple and flexible either in Japan or in the world. The Metasonic Suite is very fast. If the modeling is done it is already developed and you can execute it directly. It is a user-friendly tool and very simple but it still has flexibility. It is a tool with depth. On top the burden for operation is very minimal so that you can use the time to think about new things with the customer. In that sense it is high quality infrastructure.“

Hiroyuki Okada,Former President of NEC Informatec Systems

Metasonic AG · Münchner Str. 29 - Hettenshausen · D-85276 Pfaffenhofen/Germany

T: +49 8441 278 10 0 · F: +49 8441 278 10 999 · www.metasonic.de · [email protected]

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Perform: Evolve your business

No masterpiece was ever created overnight. This applies to art as well as the activities of a commercial enterprise. It takes a lot of time to make the right deci-sions, think through all of the options and minimize risk, but you do not have time if you want to be a pioneer on the market that is one step ahead of everyone.

As the world gets smaller, more and more events are becoming relevant to you and more and more possible scenarios need to be taken into account. Ultimately, the roll-out of products and business models, complete with the IT support required for this is always associated with considerable outlay and expenditure. Most IT so-lutions are difficult to change, and can in fact only be changed to a certain degree. As a result, without detailed planning, the risks remain high.

Tedious planning phases, however, are at odds with the dynamic world of business. In addition, it is usually only the market itself which decides whether or not your offerings are on target, but its behavior is becoming increasingly more difficult to pre-dict. Experimenting with new ideas in the marketplace, furthermore, has the effect of rousing the competition to action. So, if you do not want to lose your advantage, you must reconfigure your line-up quickly and often. For this you need solutions which are flexible enough to implement knowledge derived from practical experience im-mediately.

With Metasonic, you develop solutions within days, revise them repeatedly to suit new demands, and continuously adapt and expand them. The boundary between experiment and operational use, between prototype and solution, is erased. This puts you in a position to seize market positions quickly and to hold them long-term. You can develop solutions within days and enjoy the advantages of being a pioneer. Into the bargain, you collect key performance indicators from the very start; you can analyze them and integrate your gained practical experience directly into the modifications. Thus you are continually adjusting your company performance while doing business.

THE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE:

You‘d love to enable your staff to try things out and change them, perceive opportunities and achieve successes.

But to do this you‘d need easily adaptable IT solutions that address the individual demands of the departments and also accommodate IT‘s harmonization efforts.

If you were to have IT so-lutions that allowed you to perceive situations quickly, constantly learn lessons from everyday practice and imple-ment the content right away, you could think in different dimensions when it comes to the evolution of your busi-ness.

“Measured against our expectations, the results are considerably more than satisfactory. Using this tool based on the Metasonic Suite shows us right now what potential improvements there are and what possible opportunities for de-ployment are still available. We actually now want to solve problems beyond our initial goals that we didn‘t want to even consider tackling in the context of this project.“

Dr.-Ing. Jan Späth, Head of MT4 Acceptance Test Electronics,Tesat

“It is only through the initiative, crea- tivity or even passion of employees that competitive advantages are created today that play a decisive role in influencing customers‘ decisions. This motivation is given a sizeable boost with the method that underpins Metasonic.“

Manfred Heckmeier,Managing Director, FI-TS