The Standard Is Not Good Enough.
BCG's 2025 study of 1,250 senior executives found that 60% of organizations report little or no value from AI investments, while 5% capture nearly all of it. McKinsey's parallel survey of 1,993 organizations reached the same conclusion: 88% of organizations use AI, but only 6% are AI high performers.
The differentiator is not the technology. It is the discipline of selecting, sequencing, governing, and rebalancing AI initiatives as a portfolio.
EKAS exists in that gap.
Built for Manufacturing Operations, Not BI Teams
EKAS is designed for the people who run the plant floor — operations managers, plant controllers, quality directors — not for BI analysts who build dashboards. Every metric is ISO 22400-2 governed. Every answer includes full data lineage. Every failure mode reference connects to your risk documentation.
Portfolio framework, not feature checklist
EKAS organizes 16 AI capabilities across the McKinsey Three Horizons framework with structured selection criteria and quarterly governance. Features can be matched. Frameworks are different work.
Industry-specific depth
Built for precision metal stamping — ISO 22400-2 OEE methodology, AIAG 4th and AIAG-VDA 2019 FMEA grounding, IATF 16949 framework, OEM PPM threshold awareness. Depth that horizontal SaaS vendors cannot replicate without years of vertical investment.
Founder operational experience
Thirty years in precision metal stamping operations. Built by someone who has explained an EBITDA variance to a CFO and run an IATF audit at 11 PM, not someone who learned about manufacturing from customer interviews.
Honest Scope
EKAS does not replace your ERP, MES, CMMS, or QMS. It does not schedule production. It does not generate work orders. It does not perform root cause analysis for you — it surfaces the data required to perform root cause analysis faster and with more confidence.
EKAS is the analytical intelligence layer — not the execution layer. Scheduling, work orders, master data, and execution remain in your existing systems.
Target Audience
EKAS is built for SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) manufacturers — industrial firms typically employing fewer than 250 people, with limited turnover, producing goods by transforming raw materials or assembling components. These are the agile, essential shops that form the backbone of local and global supply chains, and they deserve analytics built for how they actually operate — not scaled-down versions of tools built for the Fortune 500.
SME Precision Stamping & Metalforming Shops
High-mix, low-to-medium-volume operations running multiple presses with data fragmented across ERP, MES, and the shop floor. Press-level OEE, die performance, material yield, and First Pass Yield — delivered without the six-figure implementation fee enterprise MES platforms demand.
Tier 2 and Below Component Suppliers
Component manufacturers serving automotive, appliance, HVAC, and industrial customers. Answering to customer production portals, audit teams, and quarterly cost reduction expectations — with a fraction of the analyst headcount the tier above them has.
Discrete Manufacturers with Regulated Quality Requirements
Shops where traceability, audit readiness, and governed metrics are not optional — whether the driver is IATF 16949, ISO 9001, or a customer-specific quality manual. Data integrity is a business requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Our Approach
SME manufacturers have been burned before — by six-month MES implementations, six-figure consulting fees, and dashboards that never quite matched what was actually happening on the floor. EKAS is built to not be that. Here's what working with us looks like.
Discovery
60–90 minute conversation
Structured fit assessment. Four conditions for EKAS success: data quality baseline, executive sponsor, operations–finance alignment opportunity, IATF 16949 compliance posture.
Pilot Readiness Assessment
8-week structured engagement
Data quality assessment. Three-priority initiative identification. Documented value model in dollar terms. Output is a gating decision: proceed to pilot or do not proceed.
60-Day Pilot
Live deployment
Three Horizon-1 capabilities deployed: shift handoff intelligence, downtime root cause, cost variance attribution. Weekly progress reviews against documented success criteria.
Ongoing Subscription
Quarterly portfolio governance
Subscription begins after pilot success gates trigger. Quarterly portfolio reviews. Continuous initiative scoring. New capabilities activated only after prior horizon generates documented returns.
No six-figure implementation. No data science team required. No waiting six months to see whether it works.
See Why EKAS Is Different
Request a technical demonstration to see the EvidencePacket standard in action.