2012 was a very exciting year at LNS Research, and we’re happy to say that we are just getting started. After crossing the 1000 account threshold in the first 6 months of launching our research library, we are looking forward to launching additional research practices, our benchmark data visualization portal, and advisory councils.
As the first full year is under our belt, it’s time to announce what’s to come in 2013. Just as we’ve done for Quality Management Software, we’ll be expanding our coverage areas into both the Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and Enterprise Sustainability Management (ESM) spaces. We’ll be releasing new library sections complete with best practices guides, solution selection guides, data visualizations, and research papers, as well as the corresponding surveys. Below, I’ll provide a bit more detail on these areas, touching on our focus points in the coming months.
Sustainability Research
The LNS Research Enterprise Sustainability Management model defines five keys areas of sustainability: Operational Risk Management, Product Stewardship, Environment Health and Safety (EH&S), Industrial Energy Management (Carbon and Energy), and Sustainability Reporting. Because each of these areas has its own set of best practices, strategies, management systems, and technologies, we’ve decided to create several sustainability-focused libraries as opposed to simply one large one.
In 2013, we’ll be launching two separate sustainability libraries: one that covers Operational Risk Management and EH&S and another that covers Industrial Energy Management. Our IEM Research Library is expected to be made public in the coming months, as we’ve already held a number of briefings with the industry’s top vendors. Expect to see a best practices guide on IEM software as well as a solution selection guide that focuses on three areas: procurement, use, and reporting.
In the meantime, please feel free to take a look at our previous blog posts focused on the ESM and IEM frameworks:
Manufacturing Operations Management Research
To complement our sustainability library and our quality management library, we’re taking our research down to the shop floor. For the Manufacturing Operations Management space, we’ll be covering two areas, both Manufacturing Execution System (MES) Software and Manufacturing Operations Metrics. For MES Software, we’ll be releasing a best practices guide, a solution selection guide, data points from our MES survey, and a number of research papers. Our Metrics library will provide detail into calculating manufacturing KPIs, in addition to reports written around our benchmark research in the space.
Blog posts we’ve written on these topics can be found below:
Quality Management Research
This past year, we wrote a considerable amount of posts and research papers on Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) and quality management strategies. Our Solution Selection Guide for EQMS has become the first stop on the quality management software selection journey for many executives. In addition to a number of industry-specific research papers, we released our Best Practices Guide and Top Integration Points Report for EQMS. These three reports can be found below:
As stated in yesterday’s blog post, market leading manufacturing and industrial organizations are using EQMS to help close the loop on quality management. We expect to see this trend continue and become even more prevalent in 2013. In the coming year, we’ll be expanding our coverage in quality management software research, providing more data points, benchmark reports, and other findings from our surveys and research.
Do you have any areas of interest that you would like to see LNS Research cover in 2013? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below!